Recently I worked on a task where I needed to remove uploaded blobs after a certain amount of time. My mind immediately went to Azure Blob storage lifecycle management , but the problem appeared to be a bit more nuanced than I first thought.

With lifecycle management you can define rules that automatically perform actions on blobs. Each rule consists of conditions, actions, and filters.

Conditions : Specify if the rule applies based on when a blob was created, last modified, or last accessed.

Actions : Specify which action to apply. This can be changing the blob's tier or deleting it.

Filters : Limits the rule to a subset of blobs. By default it applies to all blobs, but filters allow for filtering for certain tags or prefixes.

A common use case is to automatically clean up temporary data. You'd create a rule that filters on a prefix like tmp/ , set a condition to match blobs that haven't been modified in 30 days, and set the action to delete.…