Object Lifecycle Management

Use AIStor Object Lifecycle Management to create rules for time or date based automatic transition or expiry of objects. For object transition, AIStor automatically moves the object to a configured remote storage tier. For object expiry, AIStor automatically deletes the object.

AIStor derives its behavior and syntax from S3 lifecycle for compatibility in migrating workloads and lifecycle rules from S3 to AIStor. For example, you can export S3 lifecycle management rules and import them into AIStor or vice-versa. AIStor uses JSON to describe lifecycle management rules and may require conversion to or from XML as part of importing S3 lifecycle rules.

AIStor supports creating object transition lifecycle management rules, where AIStor can automatically move an object to a remote storage “tier”. AIStor supports any of the following remote tier targets:

• AIStor
• Amazon S3
• Google Cloud Storage
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

AIStor object transition supports use cases like moving aged data from AIStor clusters in private or public cloud infrastructure to low-cost private or public cloud storage solutions. Directory objects, which are 0-byte objects with a name ending in /, do not tier. AIStor manages retrieving tiered objects on-the-fly without any additional application-side logic.

Use the mc ilm tier add command to create a remote target for tiering data to that target. You can then use the mc ilm rule add --transition-days command to transition objects to that tier after a specified number of calendar days.

You can verify the tiering status of an object using mc ls against the bucket or bucket prefix. The output includes the storage tier of each object:

$ mc ls play/mybucket
[2022-11-08 11:30:24 PST]    52MB  STANDARD log-data.csv
[2022-11-09 12:20:18 PST]    120MB WARM event-2022-11-09.mp4

• STANDARD marks objects stored on the AIStor deployment.
• WARM marks objects stored on the remote tier with matching name.

AIStor requires exclusive access to the transitioned data on the remote storage tier. Object metadata on the “hot” AIStor source is strongly linked to the object data on the “warm/cold” remote tier. AIStor cannot retrieve object data without access to the remote, nor can the remote be used to restore lost metadata on the source.

All access to the transitioned objects must occur through AIStor using S3 API operations only. Manually modifying a transitioned object - whether the metadata on the “hot” AIStor tier or the object data on the remote “warm/cold” tier - may result in loss of that object data.

AIStor ignores any objects in the remote bucket or bucket prefix not explicitly managed by the AIStor deployment. Automatic transition and transparent object retrieval depend on the following assumptions:

• No external mutation, migration, or deletion of objects on the remote storage.
• No lifecycle management rules (for example, transition or expiration) on the remote storage bucket.

AIStor stores all transitioned objects in the remote storage bucket or resource under a unique per-deployment prefix value. This value is not intended to support identifying the source deployment from the backend. AIStor supports an additional optional human-readable prefix when configuring the remote target, which may facilitate operations related to diagnostics, maintenance, or disaster recovery.

MinIO recommends specifying this optional prefix for remote storage tiers which contain other data, including transitioned objects from other AIStor deployments. This tutorial includes the necessary syntax for setting this prefix.

AIStor tiering behavior depends on the remote storage returning objects immediately (milliseconds to seconds) upon request. AIStor therefore cannot support remote storage which requires rehydration, wait periods, or manual intervention.

AIStor creates metadata for each transitioned object that identifies its location on the remote storage. Applications cannot trivially identify and access a transitioned object independent of AIStor. Availability of the transitioned data therefore depends on the same core protections that erasure coding and distributed deployment topologies provide for all objects on the AIStor deployment. Using object transition does not provide any additional business continuity or disaster recovery benefits.

Workloads that require protections should implement AIStor Server-Side replication. Replication ensures objects remains preserved on the remote replication site, such that you can resynchronize from the remote in the event of partial or total data loss. See Resynchronization (Disaster Recovery) for more complete documentation on using replication to recover after partial or total data loss.

AIStor adopts S3 behavior for transition rules on versioned buckets. Specifically, AIStor by default applies the transition operation to the current object version.

To transition noncurrent object versions, specify the --noncurrent-transition-days and --noncurrent-transition-tier options when creating the transition rule.

AIStor lifecycle management supports expiring objects on a bucket. Object “expiration” involves performing a DELETE operation on the object. For example, you can create a lifecycle management rule to expire any object older than 365 days.

Use mc ilm rule add --expire-days to expire objects after a specified number of calendar days.

For buckets with replication configured, AIStor does not replicate objects deleted by a lifecycle management expiration rule. See Replication of Delete Operations for more information.

AIStor adopts S3 behavior for expiration rules on versioned buckets. AIStor has several default behaviors for versioned buckets:

• AIStor applies the expiration option to only the current object version by creating a DeleteMarker as is normal with versioned delete.

  To expire noncurrent object versions, specify the --noncurrent-expire-days option when creating the expiration rule.

• AIStor does not expire DeleteMarkers even if no other versions of that object exist.

  To expire delete markers when there are no remaining versions for that object, specify the --expire-delete-marker option when creating the expiration rule.

• To expire all versions of an object that does not have a delete marker after a specified period of days, use the --expire-days flag. This permits the permanent deletion of the object after the specified number of days pass.

  This flag applies only to objects that do not have a delete marker.

  To expire delete markers, include the flag --purge-all-object-versions-delete-marker.

AIStor uses a built-in scanner to actively check objects against all configured lifecycle management rules.

The scanner is a low-priority process that yields to high workloads to prevent performance spikes triggered by rule timing. The scanner may therefore not detect an object as eligible for a configured transition or expiration lifecycle rule until after the lifecycle rule period has passed.