Instalclustr disables GCP Soft-Delete on Cloud Storage Buckets

NetApp advises that we will disable the soft-delete feature on all Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud storage buckets created for use on the Instaclustr Platform. The use of this GCP feature is unnecessary in the context of the Instaclustr Platform and incurs additional costs for customers.  

The soft-delete feature, which retains deleted or overwritten objects for a specified period (default is 7 days), was launched by GCP in March 2024. This feature safeguards bucket data from accidental deletions, and was enabled by GCP on all existing buckets at the time of release and will now be enabled on any newly created buckets by default.  

Whilst this feature can be useful in some circumstances, soft-delete is unnecessary for customers on the Instaclustr managed platform due to the way Instaclustr expires data. It also incurs an additional GCP charge for data in the soft-delete state after the 31st of August 2024.  

All applications except OpenSearch that Instaclustr manages applies Object Lifecycle Management to each Cloud Storage bucket created per cluster (or data-centre) and applies a TTL policy to expire data after 7 days.  This ensures that even if data is deleted from your application, it can be restored from the saved backups for 7 days.  

OpenSearch manages backup retention periods through Index State Management tooling – which by default is also set to a 7-day retention period.  

When clusters themselves are deleted – Instaclustr does not immediately delete the bucket to ensure that data can be restored for 7 days.  

If left enabled, soft-delete currently would apply an additional 7 days of objects in the “soft-deleted” state. This period incurs an additional cost to customers for storage of the objects in that state.   

To reduce unnecessary customer costs, from August 28th 2024 Instaclustr has disabled soft-delete on all existing Instaclustr managed Cloud Storage buckets and will create any future buckets with soft-delete disabled.  

If you have any questions about Instaclustr’s backup process, or further questions about the soft-delete feature, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.