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Managing Storage Lifecycle in Azure

Requirements​

The Nautilus DevOps team needs to optimize data retention costs by automating the deletion of old blobs. They plan to implement Blob Lifecycle Management for a specific container in Azure Storage.

Task​

  1. Create a Storage Account:
  • Name the storage account devopsstor14097.
  • Set the region to East US.
  • Use Locally-redundant storage (LRS) as the redundancy option.
  1. Create a Blob Container:
  • Name the container devops-container14097.
  1. Upload a File to the Container:
  • Upload the file named tempfile.txt to the container. The file is present under /root of the client host.
  1. Configure Blob Lifecycle Management:
  • Apply a Lifecycle Management rule named devops-del-rule to the container devops-container14097 to delete blobs after 7 days of last modification.
  1. Validation:
  • Verify that the Lifecycle Management rule named devops-del-rule is correctly applied.
Note

This lab uses Azure CLI to create storage resources and apply a lifecycle policy in a single, reproducible flow.

Prerequisites​

  • Azure CLI installed and logged in (az login).
  • Access to the target subscription and resource group.
  • File /root/tempfile.txt present on the client host.

Steps​

RG=$(az group list --query "[?contains(name, 'kml')].name" --output tsv)
STORAGE_ACCOUNT="devopsstor14097"
CONTAINER_NAME="devops-container14097"
LOCATION="eastus"
RULE_NAME="devops-del-rule"
FILE_PATH="/root/tempfile.txt"

az storage account create \
  --name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" \
  --resource-group "$RG" \
  --location "$LOCATION" \
  --sku Standard_LRS \
  --kind StorageV2

az storage container create \
  --name "$CONTAINER_NAME" \
  --account-name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" \
  --auth-mode login

az storage blob upload \
  --account-name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" \
  --container-name "$CONTAINER_NAME" \
  --name tempfile.txt \
  --file "$FILE_PATH" \
  --auth-mode login

cat > lifecycle.json <<EOF
{
  "rules": [
    {
      "enabled": true,
      "name": "${RULE_NAME}",
      "type": "Lifecycle",
      "definition": {
        "actions": {
          "baseBlob": {
            "delete": {
              "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 7
            }
          }
        },
        "filters": {
          "blobTypes": ["blockBlob"],
          "prefixMatch": ["${CONTAINER_NAME}/"]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
EOF

az storage account management-policy create \
  --account-name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" \
  --resource-group "$RG" \
  --policy @lifecycle.json

Verification​

  • Confirm container exists:
    • az storage container show --name "$CONTAINER_NAME" --account-name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" --auth-mode login --query name -o tsv
  • Confirm blob upload:
    • az storage blob show --account-name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" --container-name "$CONTAINER_NAME" --name tempfile.txt --auth-mode login --query name -o tsv
  • Confirm lifecycle rule:
    • az storage account management-policy show --account-name "$STORAGE_ACCOUNT" --resource-group "$RG" --query "policy.rules[0].name" -o tsv

Resources​