Question

A data engineering team stores raw ingestion files in an S3 bucket with versioning enabled to protect against accidental overwrites. Objects are frequently overwritten as corrected files arrive, so many noncurrent (previous) versions accumulate. The team wants current versions to remain instantly accessible in S3 Standard, but they want to reduce storage costs by moving noncurrent versions to a cheaper tier after 30 days and permanently deleting them after 365 days. What is the MOST cost-effective and operationally efficient way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Create an S3 Lifecycle configuration with a rule that transitions noncurrent versions to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 30 days and expires noncurrent versions after 365 days.

Answer

Write a scheduled Lambda function that lists all object versions daily and deletes any noncurrent version older than 365 days, transitioning others manually via CopyObject.

Answer

Enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering on the bucket so all current and noncurrent versions are automatically moved to lower-cost tiers and deleted after 365 days.

Answer

Disable versioning and configure an S3 Lifecycle rule that transitions objects to S3 Glacier after 30 days and expires them after 365 days.