Amazon recently announced that its S3 storage facility now offers developers the opportunity to perform asynchronous replication from a source bucket to a destination bucket contained within the same region. Previously only available as Cross-Region Replication (CRR), Amazon S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR) helps to deliver market-leading replication services for enterprises all of sizes.
So how does this new service change the Amazon S3 offering?
Amazon S3 Same-Region Replication Offers New Capabilities to Developers
The advent of SRR means that organisations can now store data in separate buckets whilst remaining with the same AWS region. There’s no longer a need to move data out of the region – for example from a source bucket in London, to a target bucket in Frankfurt. Instead, developers can now replicate items without necessitating vast geographical separation.
By using CRR and SRR together, developers can unlock a new range of capabilities such as cross-account replication and replication to any Amazon S3 storage class, including S3 Glacier and S3 Deep Archive for backups and long-term archives respectively.
With SRR, objects uploaded to the source bucket can be configured for replication at bucket, prefix, or object tag levels. What’s more, replicated objects can be owned by both the original AWS account or by different accounts, safeguarding against accidental deletion.
The launch of SRR also brings a wide range of benefits for organisations.
Benefits of Using Same-Region Replication
SRR allows companies to take advantage of a range of new features. For example, logs can now be streamlined into a single bucket. If you’ve previously stored logs across multiple accounts and multiple buckets, you can now consolidate them all into one in-region bucket, making the processing of logs far more efficient.
Secondly, you can now facilitate real-time replication between developer and test accounts that share the same data. It’s now possible to replicate objects between multiple accounts without altering object metadata by utilising SRR rules.
In the age of GDPR and other similar data regulations, SRR is particularly useful for organisations who need to adhere to guidelines that stipulate that data must be kept in different AWS accounts whilst remaining in the same country. With SRR, companies can now replicate critical data without breaking any data sovereignty laws.
Requirements for Same-Region Replication
In order to take advantage of the benefits of SRR (and CRR), developers must make sure the following requirements are adhered to:
- The source bucket owner must have the source and destination AWS Regions enabled for their account. The destination bucket owner must have the destination Region enabled for their account.
- Both source and destination buckets must have versioning enabled.
- Amazon S3 must have permissions to replicate objects from the source bucket to the destination bucket on your behalf.
- If the owner of the source bucket doesn’t own the object in the bucket, the object owner must grant the bucket owner READand READ_ACP permissions with the object access control list (ACL).
- If the source bucket has Amazon S3 object lock enabled, the destination bucket must also have object lock enabled.
There may be a situation whereby the source and destination buckets are owned by different AWS accounts. If this is the case, there is an additional requirement which stipulates destination bucket owners must grant the owner of the source bucket permissions to replicate objects with a bucket policy.
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