Blob Lifecycle Tiering and Cleanup

Overview

This flow automates cost-saving lifecycle management for Azure Blob Storage. On a daily schedule it scans a configured source folder, evaluates each blob's age, and applies a single mutually-exclusive lifecycle action - tier to Cool, tier to Archive, or delete (retention) - then writes an audit row to Dataverse for every action and posts a run summary (counts + bytes reclaimed) to a Microsoft Teams channel.

Why it matters: keeping cold data on hot-tier storage is expensive. Rule-driven, reportable tiering and cleanup cut storage cost while keeping the process auditable and portable across tenants.

Ships Off (demo). The connector cannot set native access tiers, so tiering is folder-based moves (copy + delete); see customizations to drive true Hot/Cool/Archive tiers.

Use Case

IT admins and developers want automated, reportable tiering and retention enforcement across a storage account without hand-managing files or relying solely on static lifecycle policies.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Native access tiers

Replace the folder-move actions with an ARM/HTTP Set Blob Tier call, or point the cool/archive folders at containers governed by an Azure lifecycle-management policy.

Access-based tiering

Decide on last-accessed time rather than LastModified (requires last-access tracking on the account).

Per-container rules

Drive thresholds from a Dataverse config table (one row per container) instead of fixed Initialize Variables.

Legal hold

Add a check to skip blobs flagged for legal hold before deleting.

Recursion

Extend the listing to walk sub-folders if the source tree is nested.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

int(div(sub(ticks(utcNow()), ticks(item()?['LastModified'])), 864000000000))

greaterOrEquals(variables('varBlobAgeDays'), variables('varDeleteAfterDays'))

concat(variables('varArchiveFolder'), '/', item()?['DisplayName'])

div(variables('varBytesReclaimed'), 1048576)