Configure Activation retention

Activation retention is applied by kix gc. Choose a minimum history, a maximum history, and an age limit each time you run or schedule garbage collection.

Use the default policy

The default invocation applies this policy to Superseded Activations:

• always keep the 10 newest records;
• never keep more than 50 records;
• beyond the newest 10, retire records older than 30 days.

Run garbage collection without retention flags to use those defaults:

Run in kix-examples/

❱ kix gc how-to-application

Kix prints the records it plans to retire and asks for confirmation before it deletes them.

Set a retention policy

Use --keep, --keep-max, and --keep-for together when your policy differs from the defaults. This example always keeps the newest 20 records, retains no more than 100, and retires older records after 90 days once they are outside the protected newest 20:

Run in kix-examples/

❱ kix gc how-to-application --keep 20 --keep-max 100 --keep-for 90d

The minimum wins if --keep-max is lower than --keep.

--keep-for accepts days, hours, minutes, or seconds, such as 30d, 12h, 45m, or 30s. A bare number means days.

Keep records by count only

Disable the age rule with --keep-for off or --keep-for 0:

Run in kix-examples/

❱ kix gc how-to-application --keep 10 --keep-max 50 --keep-for off

Kix then keeps between 10 and 50 of the newest Superseded records, regardless of age.

Schedule the same policy

Pass the complete policy in automation rather than relying on an operator’s shell defaults:

Run in kix-examples/

❱ kix gc how-to-application --keep 20 --keep-max 100 --keep-for 90d --yes

--yes skips the destructive confirmation, so use it only after reviewing the same policy and target cluster interactively.

Retired Activations no longer appear as rollback targets. The next deployment removes their hashes from the activation history stored on managed resources.

Use it in a task

See Garbage-collect stale resources to choose between normal, hard-scan, and operator garbage collection.