A rapid parallelized AWS S3 key & bucket deleter.

I was recently tasked with deleting an bucket in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) that contained an absolutely massive number of files.

Unfortunately, Amazon themselves do not give you an easy way to do this yourself. Their web interface stalls indefinitely when you delete an "adequately large" number of files, and their CLI tool (aptly named "aws-cli") only deletes files in a single-threaded fashion (i.e. slowly).

After googling around a bit, I encountered s3nukem (itself a fork of s3nuke), which appeared to be the solution to my problems. After a few minutes of trying to find the 'right' version of RightAWS (the s3nukem code & readme had a disagreement over this), I was able to get it up and running. However, after a bit of back-of-the-napkin math, it was looking like it was still going to take at least a month of running s3nukem before the bucket was deleted.

So, I wrote s3wipe. S3wipe, as far as I know, is the only S3 key/bucket deletion tool that:

• Does parallel, thread-based delete AND list operations (more speed)
• Performs batch deletes (MOAR SPEED!)
• Will delete versioned objects (MOAR... well, deletes)

Using s3wipe, I was able to delete 400 million S3 objects in about 24 hours.

This is just a single-file script, so just go ahead and run it. It will need a semi-recent version of the "boto" python module to be installed, though, so:

pip install boto

or

yum install python-boto

or

apt-get install python-boto

Then:

wget https://raw.github.com/eschwim/s3wipe/master/s3wipe
chmod 755 s3wipe

Build the Docker image:

docker build -t s3wipe:latest .

Then run the script:

docker run s3wipe:latest --help

usage: s3wipe [-h] --s3_path PATH --s3_access_key ID --s3_secret_key KEY [--s3_host HOST]
              [--dryrun] [--quiet] [--batchsize BATCHSIZE] [--maxqueue MAXQUEUE] [--delbucket]

Recursively delete all keys in an S3 path

optional arguments:
  -h, --help             show this help message and exit
  --s3_path PATH         S3 path to delete (e.g. s3://bucket/path)
  --s3_access_key ID     Your AWS access key ID
  --s3_secret_key KEY    Your AWS secret access key
  --s3_host HOST         Your AWS provider host (e.g. s3.amazonaws.com)
  --dryrun               Don't delete. Print what we would have deleted
  --quiet                Suprress all non-error output
  --batchsize BATCHSIZE  # of keys to batch delete (default 100)
  --maxqueue MAXQUEUE    Max size of deletion queue (default 10k)
  --delbucket            If S3 path is a bucket path, delete the bucket also

v0.2

You can now delete all keys under an arbitrary S3 path, instead of only
entire buckets (although that is still an option, as well).

v0.1

Initial version.