Can I delete container images from Google Cloud Storage artifacts bucket?

Question

I have a Google App Engine app, which connects to Google Cloud Storage.

I noticed that the amount of data stored was unreasonably high (4.01 GB, when it should be 100MB or so).

So, I looked at how much each bucket was storing, and I found that there was an automatically created bucket called us.artificats. that was taking up most of the space.

I looked inside, and all it has is one folder: containers/images/.

From what I've Googled, it seems like these images come from Google Cloud Build.

My question is, can I delete them without compromising my entire application?

Answer 1

For those of you seeing this later on, I ended up deleting the folder, and everything was fine.

When I ran Google Cloud Build again, it added items back into the bucket, which I had to delete later on.

As @HarshitG mentioned, this can be set up to happen automatically via deletion rules in cloud storage. As for myself, I added a deletion step to my deployment GitHub action.

Answer 2

I have solved this problem by applying a deletion rule. Here's how to do it:

1. Open the project in Google Cloud console
2. Open the storage management (search for "Storage" for example).
3. In the Browser tab, select the container us.artifacts....
4. Now, open the Lifecycle section. You should see something like:

5. Click on Add a rule and provide the following conditions:
   1. In the action, select Delete object
   2. In the conditions, select Age and enter for example 3 days
6. Click on create to confirm the creation

Now all objects older than 3 days will be automatically deleted. It might take a few minutes for this new rule to be applied by Google Cloud.