Lifecycle policy specification includes:

• Cluster setting

• Policy header on domain objects (optional)

• Policy headers on bucket objects

Cluster Setting Values

The Swarm cluster setting policy.lifecycle supports two values:

• disabled – A default value for the evaluation of all lifecycle policies in the cluster to provide legacy behavior.

• enabled – Either enable or disable lifecycle policies at the domain level for domains where such policies are applied.

Use Management API for policy.lifecycle setting.

Domain Setting Values

Domain objects support a Policy-Lifecycle header to control the behavior of lifecycle policies for buckets in the domain. The header supports either of the following values:

• <unspecified> – The lack of a defined policy header represents that lifecycle policies are enabled for buckets in the domain when the policy.lifecycle setting is enabled. Applying lifecycle policy at the domain level is optional.

• enabled – The lifecycle policies are enabled for buckets in a domain when the policy.lifecycle cluster setting is enabled.

• disabled – The lifecycle policies are disabled for buckets in a domain regardless of policy.lifecycle setting.

Bucket Setting Values

Bucket objects support a Policy-Lifecycle header with multiple values.

• Each header value encodes one lifecycle policy rule.

• Each lifecycle rule is comprised of a number of optional attributes, expressed as <name>:<value> pairs separated by space. Extra spaces are allowed at the beginning, end, and before & after the colon.

Supported Rule Attributes

Rules with Attributes

Every rule:

• Must have one or multiple expiration attributes.

• ExpirationDays and ExpirationDate attributes are mutually exclusive.

• ObsoleteExpirationDays and ObsoleteExprirationDate attributes are mutually exclusive.

Expiration Time Rule

• For expiration days,
  Expiration time = Creation time of the current version + Number of days indicated + Rounded up to the next midnight UTC

• For obsolete expiration days,
  Expiration time = Create time of the next newest object version + Number of days indicated + Rounded up to the next midnight UTC

• ISO 8601 dates must unambiguously specify a calendar date. The (unspecified) expiration time is always midnight UTC of that date; any timezone specification is not allowed.

• Expiration of a current version of an object (i.e. non-delete marker in the versioning enabled bucket) represents creating a delete marker, pushing the current version down the versioning stack.

• In all other cases, the object or object version is permanently deleted.

The gateway supports SCSP reads & writes of domain and bucket headers with lifecycle policies specified. The Gateway S3 interface is modified to support GET, PUT, DELETE, and related permissions (GetLifecycleConfiguration and PutLifecycleConfiguration) for bucket lifecycle policies as specified defined in the S3 documentation. Gateway validates policies against the S3 specification. On PUT or DELETE permission, the gateway translates the client-supplied bucket policy specifications into the appropriate Swarm bucket headers. Bucket lifecycle policy features provided via using S3 that Swarm does not support not supported by Swarm (such as storage class transitions) are dropped during this translation. On the bucket lifecycle policy GET reply, Gateway performs reverse translation for any Policy-Lifecycle headers on the bucket object into an S3-compatible format.

Swarm Content Portal provides a convenient method of managing policies. This information is provided for completeness.