Read a lifecycle configuration the way the bill does. Two of these rules cost money quietly, and neither of them is visible in the console.
Or drop a file anywhere on this panel. Nothing is uploaded: the analysis runs in this tab.
The answer appears here
Paste on the left and press Analyze. Nothing leaves this tab.
Nothing else to flag.
No formatting problems, and nothing the rules object to. Worth remembering what that covers: this reads the file you pasted, not the account or cluster it will be applied to.
No finding matches that filter.
Real input you can load into the tool above. Each one shows a different thing going wrong, because that is what the tool is for.
Pays for 90 days of Glacier and uses 30 of them
{
"Rules": [
{
"ID": "archive",
"Status": "Enabled",
"Filter": { "Prefix": "logs/" },
"Transitions": [{ "Days": 30, "StorageClass": "GLACIER" }],
"Expiration": { "Days": 60 },
"NoncurrentVersionExpiration": { "NoncurrentDays": 7 },
"AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload": { "DaysAfterInitiation": 7 }
}
]
}Abandoned parts billed forever and invisible in every listing
{
"Rules": [
{
"ID": "expire",
"Status": "Enabled",
"Filter": { "Prefix": "tmp/" },
"Expiration": { "Days": 30 },
"NoncurrentVersionExpiration": { "NoncurrentDays": 7 }
}
]
}Writes a delete marker and keeps every version at full price
{
"Rules": [
{
"ID": "expire",
"Status": "Enabled",
"Filter": { "Prefix": "logs/" },
"Expiration": { "Days": 30 },
"AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload": { "DaysAfterInitiation": 7 }
}
]
}These are the ones that fail silently. The config is accepted, nothing raises an error, and the consequence arrives later.
Each storage class has a minimum billable duration charged whether or not the object lives that long, so a 30 day stay in Glacier is billed as 90.
Instead:Either keep the object past the minimum, or skip the transition and expire straight from Standard.
Expiration writes a delete marker and keeps every previous version at full price.
Instead:Add NoncurrentVersionExpiration, and ExpiredObjectDeleteMarker to clean up what is left.
Abandoned parts are stored and billed indefinitely and are invisible in every object listing.
Instead:Add one unfiltered rule with AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload set to 7 days, and run aws s3api list-multipart-uploads to see what is already there.
Glacier bills 90 days and Deep Archive bills 180, whether or not the object survives that long. Archiving at day 30 and expiring at day 60 pays for 90 days of storage and uses 30 of them.
Every object moved is a request, and for a bucket of millions of small objects the transition can cost more than the storage it saves. Which is why S3 does not transition anything under 128 KB to Infrequent Access at all: the rule runs, and a bucket of small objects is untouched, exactly as documented.
8 KB at Standard rates for the name and metadata, and 32 KB at the archive rate for the index. Archiving objects smaller than that costs more than leaving them where they are, which makes aggregation the first step rather than an optimisation.
It writes a delete marker. Every previous version stays at full price, the console shows the object as gone, and the bill does not move. NoncurrentVersionExpiration is the setting that actually removes data, and it is a separate line.
Parts of an upload that never finished do not appear in the console's object list or in a bucket's object count, and nothing expires them by default. Buckets have been found holding more in abandoned parts than in objects. One rule with AbortIncompleteMultipartUpload fixes it permanently.
S3 does not pick one rule and ignore the other. Where two rules cover the same object, the shorter expiration and the cheaper transition win, which is rarely what somebody had in mind when they added the second rule.
Down the chain toward colder storage. Bringing archived data back is a restore and a copy, not a lifecycle rule, and S3 rejects a configuration that tries.