Master the ECR Lifecycle: Automating Image Cleanup
Why Lifecycle Policies? Every time your CI/CD pipeline runs docker push, you're adding roughly 200MB–1GB of data to your AWS bill. Without a policy, that data sits there forever. Lifecycle policies...
Source: DEV Community
Why Lifecycle Policies? Every time your CI/CD pipeline runs docker push, you're adding roughly 200MB–1GB of data to your AWS bill. Without a policy, that data sits there forever. Lifecycle policies allow you to define rules like: "Keep only the last 10 images." "Delete anything older than 14 days." "Expire untagged images immediately." The "Perfect" Policy for Dev/Staging For most teams, the best balance between "safety" and "savings" is a two-rule policy. 1. The "Untagged" Rule (Priority 1) When you push a new image with the same tag (like :latest), the old image becomes "untagged." These are orphaned layers that serve no purpose. Delete them after 24 hours. 2. The "Age" Rule (Priority 2) Delete any image that hasn't been pushed in the last 30 days. This ensures that even if you stop a project, its storage costs don't haunt you for years. The JSON Configuration { "rules": [ { "rulePriority": 1, "description": "Cleanup orphaned/untagged images", "selection": { "tagStatus": "untagged",
