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Managing the lifecycle of objects

Reviewed on 23 November 2023Published on 14 May 2019

Before you start

To complete the actions presented on this page, you must have:

  • Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization

It is possible to configure the lifecycle of a group of objects so that their storage costs can be effectively managed. A lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that defines actions applied to a group of objects stored on Object Storage.

Currently, the expiration, transition, and incomplete multipart uploads actions are supported on the platform:

  • Expiration defines when objects expire. This allows for the automatic deletion of objects on your behalf.
  • Transition defines when objects change storage classes.
  • Incomplete Multipart Uploads allows you to stop uploads automatically if they are not completed.
Important

Lifecycle rules only allow the following transitions:

  • Standard -> Onezone IA
  • Standard -> Glacier
  • Onezone IA -> Glacier

Refer to this documentation to manually change the storage class of your objects.

There might, for example, be a need to store log files for a week or a month, after which they become obsolete. It is possible to set a lifecycle rule to delete them automatically when they become obsolete. If you consider that a 3-month-old object is rarely used but still has a value, you might want to configure a rule to send it automatically to Scaleway Glacier, for example.

Lifecycle management on Object Storage is available on every AWS S3 compliant tool (sdk, aws-cli, boto, etc), as well as from the Scaleway console.

Lifecycle specification

A lifecycle configuration is an XML file, containing a set of rules with predefined actions that you want Object Storage to perform on objects during their lifetime:

<LifecycleConfiguration>
<Rule>
...
</Rule>
<Rule>
...
</Rule>
...
</LifecycleConfiguration>

Each Rule consists of the following:

  • Filter identifying a subset of objects to which the rule applies.
  • Status whether the rule is in effect (a rule can be present but Disabled)
  • Lifecycle transition(s) to perform on the selected objects
Important

Lifecycle rules are limited to 500,000 jobs per day. Beyond this limit, you can transition or delete your objects manually.

Available XML tokens

Rule

Description
Container for a lifecycle rule. There is a limit of one thousand (1000) rules per bucket.
Parent
LifecycleConfiguration

Filter

Description
Container for elements that describes the subset of the object the rule applies for. If the content of the tag is empty, the rule applies to all objects in the bucket.
Parent
Rule

And

Description
Container for chaining rule filters.
Parent
Rule

Sample

<And>
<Prefix>myprefix</Prefix>
<Tag>
<Key>mytagkey1</Key>
<Value>mytagvalue1</Value>
</Tag>
</And>

This applies the Prefix rule and the Tag.

Prefix

Description
Object key prefix identifying one or more objects to which the rule applies. Object Storage limits this token to 1 per Filter Rule.
Parent
Filter or And

Tag

Description
Container for specifying a Key and a Value.
Parent
Filter or And

Status

Description
Describes whether or not a rule is enabled.
Parent
Rule
Values
Enabled, Disabled

Transition

Description
Specifies a period and a destination for an object’s lifetime
Parent
Rule

Days

Description
Specifies the number of days after object creation when the rule takes effect.
Parent
Transition and/or Expiration

StorageClass

Description
Specifies the storage class to which the object shall be transferred. On the Scaleway platform the storage classes STANDARD, GLACIER and ONEZONE_IA are available.
Parent
Transition

Expiration

Description
Describes the expiration of the object lifetime. If versioning is enabled, this rule only deletes the current version of an object.
Parent
Rule

ID

Description
Unique identifier for the rule. This value is limited to 255 characters.
Parent
Rule

Configuration example

<LifecycleConfiguration xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/">
<Rule>
<ID>id-1</ID>
<Expiration>
<Days>0</Days>
</Expiration>
<Filter>
<And>
<Prefix>myprefix</Prefix>
<Tag>
<Key>mytagkey1</Key>
<Value>mytagvalue1</Value>
</Tag>
<Tag>
<Key>mytagkey2</Key>
<Value>mytagvalue2</Value>
</Tag>
</And>
</Filter>
<Status>Enabled</Status>
</Rule>
</LifecycleConfiguration>

The lifecycle configuration above translates to the following effective rules:

  • on the rule named id-1, we set the objects with the myprefix Prefix
  • the tags mytagkey1, mytagkey2 sets to mytagvalue1
  • ‘mytagvalue2’ is set to expire after one day.
Note

To see examples of lifecycle rules API requests, refer to the Bucket Operations documentation page.

Setting rules for incomplete multipart uploads

When using the awscli to perform a multipart upload, it is possible to set a bucket lifecycle rule that allows you to automate the stoppage of uploads if they are not completed. You can define a deadline for the expected completion with a lifecycle rule. If the multipart upload is incomplete by the end of the defined timeframe, it will be stopped and the parts associated with it will be deleted.

You can automate the removal of incomplete multipart uploads by adding or uploading a lifecycle configuration to your bucket. The set-up can be done via an API call or an AWS-CLI command.

Send a PutBucketLifecycle request with the following XML payload:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<LifecycleConfiguration xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/">
<Rule>
<ID>Remove uncompleted uploads</ID>
<Filter>
<Prefix></Prefix>
</Filter>
<Status>Enabled</Status>
<AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload>
<DaysAfterInitiation>1</DaysAfterInitiation>
</AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload>
</Rule>
</LifecycleConfiguration>
Note

In this example, the multipart upload timeframe is of one day. You may change the number of DaysAfterInitiation according to your preference by replacing 1 in the XML payload.

CLI command

  • Create a file called incomplete-upload-lifecycle-policy.json with the following content.
Note

In this example, the multipart upload timeframe is of one day. You may change the number of DaysAfterInitiation according to your preference by replacing 1 in the .json file body.

{
"Rules": [{
"ID": "Remove uncompleted uploads",
"Status": "Enabled",
"Filter": {
"Prefix": ""
},
"AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload": {
"DaysAfterInitiation": 1
}
}]
}
  • Run the command:
aws s3api put-bucket-lifecycle-configuration --bucket my-bucket --lifecycle-configuration file://incomplete-upload-lifecycle-policy.json
See also
Installing rcloneManaging Object Storage using the CLI (v2)
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