Implement Blob storage lifecycle policies

You can add, edit, or remove a policy by using any of the following methods:

• Azure portal
• Azure PowerShell
• Azure CLI
• REST APIs

The following are the steps and some examples for the Portal and Azure CLI.

Azure portal

There are two ways to add a policy through the Azure portal: Azure portal List view, and Azure portal Code view. Following is an example of how to add a policy in the Azure portal Code view.

Azure portal Code view

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your storage account.
2. Under Data management, select Lifecycle Management to view or change lifecycle management policies.
3. Select the Code View tab. On this tab, you can define a lifecycle management policy in JSON.

The following JSON is an example of a policy that moves a block blob whose name begins with log to the cool tier if it has been more than 30 days since the blob was modified.

{
  "rules": [
    {
      "enabled": true,
      "name": "move-to-cool",
      "type": "Lifecycle",
      "definition": {
        "actions": {
          "baseBlob": {
            "tierToCool": {
              "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 30
            }
          }
        },
        "filters": {
          "blobTypes": [
            "blockBlob"
          ],
          "prefixMatch": [
            "sample-container/log"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Azure CLI

To add a lifecycle management policy with Azure CLI, write the policy to a JSON file, then call the az storage account management-policy create command to create the policy.

az storage account management-policy create \
    --account-name <storage-account> \
    --policy @policy.json \
    --resource-group <resource-group>

A lifecycle management policy must be read or written in full. Partial updates aren't supported.