Data Retention Service
A generic, event-driven pattern to enforce retention policies: detect expired data, publish cleanup events, run idempotent workers, then update metadata and storage with a complete audit trail.
Detection
- —Scheduler (hourly / daily / monthly)
- —Policy evaluation + eligibility checks
- —Catalog scan + partition selection
Queue / Event Bus
- —Event publishing
- —Routing + fanout
- —Backpressure, retries, DLQ
Workers
- —Partition cleanup
- —Data deletion (parallel + rate limited)
- —Idempotent execution
Storage + Metadata
- —Metadata catalog updates
- —Object storage deletion
- —Audit trail + reporting
Component details(+ principles)
Event Dispatcher
Evaluates retention rules, selects eligible partitions/files, and publishes cleanup events.
Queue / Event Bus
Decouples detection from execution and enables scalable, reliable processing with retries.
Retention Workers
Consume events and perform cleanup in parallel across metadata and storage layers.
Metadata Catalog
Stores schemas and partition state. Workers update catalog state during cleanup.
Object Storage
Data files reside here. Workers delete files based on retention policy decisions.
Audit + Controls
Captures what was deleted, when, and why—supporting compliance and investigations.
Key architectural principles
Outcomes
Automated enforcement
Retention policies execute automatically with no manual cleanup or operational overhead.
Lower storage costs
Reduces total storage footprint and cloud spend by continuously removing expired data.
Compliance ready
Creates a full audit trail of what was deleted, when, and why for governance needs.
Horizontally scalable
Event-driven workers scale out to handle growth without re-architecting the system.
Reliable execution
Idempotent operations allow safe retries and fault tolerance during failures.
Built-in guardrails
Rate limits, batching, and backpressure protect storage systems and prevent runaway deletes or production impact.
Note: This page is intentionally generic (no vendor or internal system names). Swap in your platform equivalents as needed.