New – Amazon S3 Replication Adds Support for Multiple Destination Buckets

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) supports many types of replication, including S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR), which launched in 2019 and S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR), which has been around since 2015. Today, we are happy to announce Amazon S3 Replication support for multiple destination buckets. Amazon S3 Replication now gives you the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets. With S3 Replication (multi-destination) you can replicate data in the same AWS Regions using S3 SRR or across different AWS Regions by using S3 CRR, or a combination of both.

Before this launch, if you needed to have multiple copies of your data in different Amazon S3 buckets, you had to build your own Amazon S3 replication service by monitoring Amazon S3 events, identifying created objects, and using AWS Lambda functions to copy objects to each destination bucket.

This launch removes the need for you to develop your own solutions to replicate the data across multiple destinations. You can use the flexibility of Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination) to store multiple copies of your data in different storage classes, with different encryption types, or across different accounts depending on its intended use. Additionally, when replicating to multiple destinations, you can use CloudWatch metrics to track replication progress for each region pair.

Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination) is an extension to Amazon S3 Replication, and it supports all existing Amazon S3 Replication features like Replication Time Control (RTC) and delete marker replication. If you need a predictable replication time backed by a Service Level Agreement, you can use RTC to replicate objects in less than 15 minutes.

How to Get Started With Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination)
In order to get Amazon S3 Replication working, all the buckets involved in the replication (source and destinations) must have bucket versioning enabled.

To setup Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination), you need to define replication rules. You can create a new rule in the bucket Management page, under Replication Rules.

When creating a new replication rule, one very important step is to set up permissions for replication, as Amazon S3 will need to replicate objects on your behalf. To do that, you can follow the instructions available in the Amazon S3 documentation page.

To create the replication rule, just follow the steps in the console. You can specify to which objects of the bucket this rule applies, the destination bucket, if you want to change the storage class of the replicated objects and many other preferences for your replicated objects.

One thing to have in mind when activating a rule is that the replication will start for all new objects added to the bucket from that moment. Objects uploaded to the bucket before the rule was created need to be copied using one time operations like Amazon S3 Batch Operations or Amazon S3 copy.

If you want to monitor the progress of your replication using CloudWatch metrics, don’t forget to click the Replication metrics and notifications checkbox.

Now that we support multiple destinations for replication, rule priorities are used when there are two or more rules with the same destination. When that happens, the rule with the highest priority will be applied. For the same destination bucket, a lower priority rule will not be applied when the replication configuration has two or more rules with overlapping scope. If there are two or more rules with the same scope and different destinations, both rules will be applied.

You can see a summary of all your rules in the Replication rules listing under the bucket Management page.

Monitoring Replication
When you have all the rules configured, you can start uploading objects to the source bucket and monitor how they get replicated in all the different destinations.

To know the replication status of an object in the source bucket, you can see the Replication status in the object Details. The status types are:

• COMPLETED: The replication was successful in all the destinations.
• PENDING: The replication is still in progress.
• FAILED: The replication failed to replicate in at least one of the destinations. When there is a failure in replication, the only way to fix it is by uploading the object again.

For replicated objects, you will see the REPLICA status under the Replication status.

You can also use CloudWatch metrics to monitor the replication. First, you need to enable metrics for each of the rules. And then in the bucket Metrics, you can choose which rules you want to see the metrics of and see the charts for each of them; the metrics are also available in the CloudWatch console.

Availability
Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination) is available today in all AWS Regions. To get started, you can use the AWS Management Console, SDKs, S3 API, or AWS CloudFormation to create replication rules from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets.

Pricing for Amazon S3 Replication (multi-destination) applies for each rule. For pricing information, please visit the Amazon S3 pricing page.

For more information about this new feature visit the Amazon S3 Replication page.

— Marcia