Delete storage buckets

This page guides you through how to delete storage buckets within Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped appliance environments. It covers prerequisites and methods for deleting buckets through the GDC console and command line interface (CLI). Learn how to delete buckets with retention policies by crypto shredding—a process where you delete the encryption key associated with the storage bucket. This information lets you securely and permanently manage the lifecycle of your object storage, providing data hygiene and compliance

This page is for audiences such as IT admins within the infrastructure operator group or developers within the application operator group who are responsible for managing object storage resources in GDC air-gapped environments.

Before you begin

A project namespace manages bucket resources in the Management API server. You must have a project to work with buckets and objects.

You must also have the appropriate bucket permissions to perform the following operation. See Grant bucket access.

You can delete storage buckets by using the kubectl CLI. Buckets must be empty before you can delete them.

  1. Use the GET or DESCRIBE command to get the fully qualified bucket name.

  2. If the bucket is not empty, empty the bucket:

    gdcloud storage rm --recursive s3://FULLY_QUALIFIED_BUCKET_NAME

  3. Delete the empty bucket:

    kubectl delete buckets/BUCKET_NAME --namespace NAMESPACE_NAME