Lifecycle Management Service

Lifecycle management enables you to set policies in Zenko that control the lifecycle of objects in a bucket conforming to AWS S3 lifecycle rules. Lifecycle management gives users the ability to specify a time threshold beyond which certain files are to be moved (lifecycle transition) or expunged (lifecycle expiration) to free up storage space or reduce storage costs. You can control lifecycle policies using the Orbit user interface, or with API calls.

Using this Backbeat extension, Zenko follows the S3 API to provide three calls to manage lifecycle properties per bucket:

  • PUT Bucket Lifecycle
  • GET Bucket Lifecycle
  • DELETE Bucket Lifecycle

These calls manage bucket attributes related to lifecycle behavior, which are stored as bucket metadata.

Note

This feature is not yet implemented for Azure Blob frontends.

Lifecycle Policies

Cloud users can apply lifecycle expiration or transition rules (specified in Amazon’s AWS S3 API) to buckets managed through Zenko. These rules are triggered after a defined time has passed since the object’s last modification.

Zenko supports expiration or transition of versioned or non-versioned objects, when a defined number of days has passed since those objects’ creation. This enables automatic deletion of older versions of versioned objects to reclaim storage space. Zenko also supports triggering expiration or transition of the latest version on a date. This is currently feasible from the S3 API, but not using Orbit. Using Zenko from the command line or from Orbit, you can expire the current version of an object with a separate rule. For versioned buckets, lifecycle adds a delete marker automatically when a rule expiring a current version is triggered, such as when a user deletes an object without first specifying a version ID.

Bucket lifecycle characteristics inhere to each bucket. Zenko’s lifecycle management feature enforces, but does not set these characteristics. When lifecycle management is enabled, the host cloud enforces buckets’ lifecycle rules.

To configure bucket lifecycle, follow the AWS S3 Lifecycle Configuration Element syntax described in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/intro-lifecycle-rules.html.

Note

Lifecycle management rules conform to the S3 lifecycle management syntax for expiration and transition policies described at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecycle-mgmt.html. Files that exceed a preconfigured temporal threshold (for example, 90 days) can be transitioned (moved) or expired (deleted) from the bucket on which they are stored.

Zenko does not support lifecycle transitions to Amazon’s STANDARD_IA or GLACIER storage classes; only to other storage locations.