A company stores server logs in an Amazon S3 bucket and must retain them for exactly one year, after which they can be deleted. What is the simplest way to automatically remove logs older than one year with the least operational overhead?

Defining an S3 Lifecycle configuration to delete objects after a specified period is the simplest and most operationally efficient solution. S3 Lifecycle policies are a native S3 feature that automatically manages object transitions and expirations without requiring any compute resources or custom code. This directly addresses the requirement for automatic deletion with minimal overhead. Creating an AWS Lambda function, scheduling a cron job on an Amazon EC2 instance, or configuring an AWS Step Functions state machine would all involve writing and maintaining custom code or infrastructure. These options introduce unnecessary operational overhead and cost compared to the native S3 Lifecycle feature, which is designed precisely for this use case.