Controlling storage costs with OneLake lifecycle management (Generally Available)

OneLake Storage Tiers and Lifecycle Management are now generally available in Microsoft Fabric. These capabilities help you reduce long-term storage costs by keeping active data in the hot tier and automatically moving less frequently accessed data to lower-cost cool or cold tiers—all while keeping your data online in OneLake.

Why storage tiering matters

With OneLake storage tiers, you have more control over your data with hot, cool, and cold storage tiers. Hot remains the default tier for frequently accessed data. Cool and cold offer lower storage costs for infrequently accessed or long-retained data without compromising durability, latency, or throughput.

While access and transaction costs increase in the cooler tiers, lifecycle management policies ensure that data is tiered based on your organization’s usage patterns.

How to get started with lifecycle management and storage tiers

With support for multiple rules, filters, and conditions, lifecycle policies are highly customizable to fit your organization’s specific data access patterns. But even straightforward policies can help save on storage costs.

The following examples demonstrate how to get started:

• Start with predictable access patterns. If a pipeline processes bronze data during the first 30 days and rarely reads it afterward, create a lifecycle rule that moves that data to the cool tier after the active processing window ends.
• Identify storage hotspots. Use OneLake storage reporting, diagnostic logs, and the OneLake MCP server to identify rarely accessed data that would benefit from tiering.
• Use auto-tiering when access patterns can change. The AutoTierFromCoolToHot lifecycle rule moves data to cool based on last access and back to hot when accessed again, helping prevent spikes in consumption over cool data.
• Use default tiers for historical workspaces. If a workspace is dedicated to historical or retained data, set the workspace default tier to cool or cold so existing files and new files move directly into the intended tier.

With these capabilities now generally available, data admins can align storage costs with data value and feel confident growing their data estate on OneLake.

Learn more

• Storage tiers in OneLake
• Creating a lifecycle management policy in OneLake
• Get the size of OneLake items
• OneLake compute and storage consumption
• Microsoft OneLake documentation