Amazon S3 announces Object Expiration

Posted on: Dec 27, 2011

We are excited to announce that starting today we're offering Object Expiration, a new feature to help you efficiently manage data stored in Amazon S3. Object Expiration allows you to schedule removal of your objects after a defined time period. Using Object Expiration rules to schedule periodic removal of objects eliminates the need to build processes to identify objects for deletion and submit delete requests to Amazon S3.

You can define Object Expiration rules for a set of objects in your bucket. Each Object Expiration rule allows you to specify a prefix and an expiration period in days. The prefix field (e.g. “logs/”) identifies the object(s) subject to the expiration rule, and the expiration period specifies the number of days from creation date (i.e. age) after which object(s) should be removed. Once the objects are past their expiration date, they will be queued for deletion. You may create multiple expiration rules for different prefixes. You can use Object Expiration rules on objects stored in both Standard and Reduced Redundancy storage.

As with standard delete requests, Amazon S3 doesn’t charge you for using Object Expiration. You can start using Object Expiration today through the AWS Management Console or the Amazon S3 API.

To learn more about Object Expiration, please refer to the Object Expiration topic in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.