Add Lifecycle Rule to S3 Bucket for Stratusphere

Introduction

Some customers who are deploying Stratusphere to their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment will want to limit the amount of Cost and Usage Reporting (CUR) data that they’re paying to store in Amazon S3. Stratusphere ingests CUR data from your AWS payer accounts on a regular basis, hence only a limited history is needed to be retained.

To reduce storage costs for CUR data, you can set up an Amazon S3 lifecycle rule on the S3 bucket created by Stratusphere. The lifecycle rule will remove objects from the S3 bucket that are older than a specified number of days. We recommend expiring objects older than 15 days.

Configure the Lifecycle Rule

Follow the directions below to set up the S3 lifecycle rule on your Amazon S3 bucket. Please remember to replicate this configuration across any AWS payer accounts you’ve connected to Stratusphere.

First, head over to the settings for the bucket.

1. Login to your AWS payer account
2. Navigate to the Amazon S3 service
3. Search for the S3 bucket with the scip prefix
4. Drill into the bucket details
5. Select the Management tab

Now you can create the lifecycle rule.

1. Click the Create Lifecycle Rule button
2. Give the rule a name, eg. stratusphere-cur-data-rule
3. Select the Apply to all objects in the bucket option
4. Check the Apply to all objects in the bucket yellow warning box
5. Check the Expire current versions of objects option
6. Enter the value 15 in the Days after object creation box
7. Click the Create Rule button

After following these steps, you’re finished! Here’s a screenshot of what the rule should look like after you’ve created it.

Conclusion

Creating lifecycle rules on S3 buckets is easy, and will minimize the cost of storing AWS CUR data long-term. If necessary, you can always submit another request for the AWS billing team to backfill historical CUR data again. If you have any additional questions about Stratusphere, please reach out to the StratusGrid team!