Storage

S3 Lifecycle Policies let you define rules that transition objects to cheaper storage classes or delete them after a specified age. By configuring a lifecycle rule, you can automatically purge data that is no longer needed, reducing storage costs and simplifying data retention management. The policy applies to all objects that match the rule's prefix and tag criteria.

S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode enforces WORM (Write Once Read Many) protection, preventing any deletion or overwrite of objects for the retention period, and works together with versioning to keep all object versions. Governance mode allows authorized users to bypass the lock, which does not satisfy strict compliance. Lifecycle rules do not prevent deletion.

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is optimized for rare access (less than once a quarter) while delivering millisecond retrieval times, making it highly cost-effective for archival data that must be accessed quickly. A diagram for this topic isn't available yet — the worked example below walks the same reasoning step by step.

• !S3 Versioning keeps multiple variants of an object in the same bucket, allowing users to easily recover from accidental deletions or overwrites.
• !Lifecycle rules do not prevent deletion.
• !Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources.

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