Amazon S3 allows users to manage objects' lifecycles in order to lower the cost of S3 objects that should be removed in a certain period, archive log files that should be stored for backup, or auditing in the future. For example, you can configure a lifecycle policy to automatically delete objects in a week because the objects are a collection of data to create reports and are not needed anymore after that. Otherwise you can archive objects into Amazon Glacier in a month because the objects are system log files, which need not be examined immediately for auditing but need to be examined in a couple of days when it's needed. In addition, Amazon S3 supports versioning so that you can create a lifecycle configuration to keep several versions of objects.

The following are the situations in which you might want to use lifecycle...