Recently, Amazon introduced a new option to its cloud storage service S3 - Same Region Replication (SRR). With this new option in S3, customers can now create a replica of their uploaded data in the same region yet in a different S3 bucket.
The new replication option SSR is a further evolution of S3 replication capability. Before S3 already supported Cross-Region Replication (CRR), allowing data replication across different AWS Regions. With both options in place, customers have, according to the announcement:
- cross-account replication for protection against accidental deletion
- and replication to any Amazon S3 storage class, including S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive to create backups and long-term archives
Paul Meighan, principal product manager, Amazon S3 at Amazon Web Services, stated in a tweet:
S3 Replication goes beyond just creating a copy, allowing you to switch accounts, switch storage classes, and do other stuff to your replica. Excited to see what customers do with replication now that they can use it in-region.
Next to SRR option, Amazon also made updates to its DataSync service, including S3 Storage Class Support. AWS DataSync allows customers to move large amounts of data into or out of the AWS Cloud. It is a managed service in the cloud suitable for migration, upload, processing, and backup of data. With the S3 Storage Class support in DataSync, customers transferring data into an Amazon S3 bucket now also have control over the storage class ranging from Standard to Glacier Deep Archive. Thus, with SRR feature and DataSync, customers can easier abide data sovereignty laws such as GDPR, by uploading, processing, and storing sensitive data locally.
AWS consultant at PA Consulting, Andrew Larsen, stated in a tweet:
At long last @awscloud have launched same region replication for s3. When your data has to stay in region for regulatory reasons, this can massively simplify backup strategies!
By uploading data in any Amazon S3 storage class, except for S3 One Zone-IA, data is always stored across a minimum of three Availability Zones, each separated by miles within an AWS Region when users configure the S3 bucket with SRR option (rule).
When a user creates and enables a rule, and uploads objects to an S3 bucket, copies of the S3 objects are made within the same AWS Region, with the same redundancy as the destination storage class. Furthermore, when an S3 object is replicated using SRR, the metadata, Access Control Lists (ACL), and object tags associated with the object are also part of the replication. And finally, with SRR enabled on the source bucket, any changes to the object, metadata, ACLs, or object tags trigger a new replication to the destination bucket.
The SRR-option is available in all AWS commercial regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. More details are available on the Amazon S3 Replication documentation and the replication FAQs.