Single-store boltdb-shipper and GCS retention period

Hello,

I’m configuring boltdb-shipper in single-store mode. In this mode, is it possible or preferred to use automated retention period on the GCS storage bucket itself? In this way table_manager would not need to be configured to handle any deletes.

Documentation in https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/operations/storage/retention/ discusses about table_manager, but also says “When using S3 or GCS, the bucket storing the chunks needs to have the expiry policy set correctly” but I assume this does not really apply to single-store mode as is.

Yes this should work however you should make sure to set the max_look_back_period on the store config to be a value less than the retention setting in GCS to avoid any potential problems.

I’m not sure if I would say I have a preference here, it seems like it might be easier to configure a retention policy on the bucket which would then handle all your deletes, having to only configure retention in one place instead of two seems less prone to error.