Storage costs rise when data accumulates without a management strategy. Continuous storage optimization is the practice of regularly evaluating your data access patterns and adjusting storage configurations to match them—keeping your architecture cost-efficient as requirements change.
Run a monthly review across three areas:
| Area | Action |
|---|---|
| Storage policies | Set up lifecycle rules to automatically transition infrequently accessed objects to lower-cost storage classes. |
| Cost visibility | Use monitoring services and bills to track storage spend and measure the impact of optimization changes. |
| Object-level controls | Apply object tags to group data by access pattern or business context, then target lifecycle rules at specific tag sets for precise control. |
Optimization by storage type
OSS and Block Storage require different optimization approaches.
OSS
Before configuring lifecycle rules, analyze your bucket access patterns to understand how frequently different objects are accessed. Use this data to define rules that match the actual data lifecycle:
Transition objects based on access frequency
Expire objects based on age
Block Storage
Monitor storage usage across your cloud disks and take the following actions to eliminate charges for unused resources:
Resize disks that are consistently underused or overused
Delete expired snapshots
Delete disks no longer attached to Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances
Related topics
Lifecycle rules: Set up automatic transitions and expiration policies for OSS objects
Object tagging: Tag objects to apply targeted lifecycle rules to specific data sets
Monitoring OSS: Track storage metrics and cost trends