Overview

LeanDB Automatic Cleanup enhances the image cleanup capability to provide a more efficient, transparent, and reliable cleanup experience. The update improves how stale images, scan resources, and known resources are managed while giving customers greater visibility into cleanup activity.

This enhancement is available as part of the U14 release.

What is changing

Key improvements include:

  • A redesigned background cleanup engine that performs cleanup gracefully without interrupting system operations or impacting platform performance
  • Enhanced UI visibility showing:

- Cleanup progress

- The estimated number of images that will be deleted based on the configured retention period

- Current cleanup configuration

  • A default image retention period of 180 days for new customers (updated from 90 days)
  • A configurable retention period of up to 365 days

No changes for existing customers who have already configured image cleanup. Cleanup is not automatically enabled for existing customers who currently have image cleanup disabled.

The cleanup process covers:

  • Scan Resource cleanup
  • Known Resource cleanup
  • Image cleanup based on the configured retention period (for example, 180 days), provided the images are not associated with active running containers

Why this change is being made

Over time, customer environments naturally accumulate large numbers of unused images, scan resources, and known resources. Many are no longer referenced by running workloads but continue to consume database storage and platform resources.

Analysis across multiple customer environments showed that image and scan data can grow significantly over time, with some environments containing hundreds of millions of stale or duplicate records.

This enhancement is designed to:

  • Improve platform performance by reducing unnecessary data growth
  • Remove stale and unused images based on customer-defined retention policies
  • Prevent duplicate scan and known resource records from accumulating over time
  • Reduce database size and improve the performance of API queries and background operations
  • Give customers greater visibility into cleanup activities before and during execution

Customer impact

This enhancement improves existing cleanup functionality without changing the behavior of customers who have already configured cleanup.

Specifically:

  • Existing cleanup configurations remain unchanged
  • Customers with cleanup disabled will not have cleanup automatically enabled after upgrade
  • New customers will have a default image retention period of 180 days

Customers who choose to enable cleanup will benefit from:

  • Reduced database growth
  • Improved platform performance and responsiveness
  • Better visibility into cleanup progress and expected results
  • More efficient management of stale images and scan data

Required customer action

No action is required. Customers who are not currently using image cleanup are encouraged to review the feature and consider enabling it based on their organization's data retention requirements.

The enhanced visibility and configurable retention policies make it easier to safely manage stale image data while retaining the information needed for operational and compliance purposes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Will cleanup be automatically enabled after upgrade?

A: No. Existing cleanup configurations remain unchanged, and cleanup is not automatically enabled for customers who currently have it disabled.

Q: What is the new default retention period?

A: New customers receive a default image retention period of 180 days. Existing configured retention settings are not changed.

Q: What is the maximum configurable retention period?

A: Up to 365 days.

Q: What data does cleanup remove?

A: Cleanup covers scan resources, known resources, and images based on the configured retention period, provided images are not associated with active running containers.