Lifecycle management policies that tier or delete blobs by age

Setting access tiers by hand does not scale when a storage account holds millions of blobs. Lifecycle management lets you define rules that Azure runs automatically, moving blobs to cooler tiers as they age and deleting them when they are no longer needed. It is the standard way to keep storage costs in line with how data is actually used: logs that are hot for a week, reports that are read for a month, backups kept for a year and then removed. One policy per account can hold many rules, so different containers or kinds of data can follow different schedules.