Cross-Region Replication for Amazon S3 was introduced last year which enables replicating objects from a S3 bucket to a different S3 bucket located in different region (it can be same/different AWS account). It’s one of the most sought after feature for long time but it doesn’t solve some of the scenarios as defined below. Synchronizing to a bucket in same region. Synchronizing to multiple destination buckets. Object ACLs needs to be set at the source bucket hence multiple different ACLs needs to be set when copying across different accounts. Replication doesn’t change the ownership of the objects hence bucket policy applied at the destination bucket won’t be honored. Refer the feedback from AWS support team regarding the last point mentioned above. Read more

I prefer creating the base AMI using packer; RDS snapshot using a Jenkins job which get triggered whenever there is a change in the database schema in the SCM. In case of installers, binaries, etc. it would be best to store them in a single S3 bucket. In all the above mentioned scenarios I prefer to share those resources to a 3rd party AWS account and remove the share when not needed. Automating this would be easy to handle add/remove permissions, hence I decided to hold the sharing details in a JSON file in the SCM. Changes to that file will trigger a Jenkins job which will invoke a Lambda function which in turn will share the resources based on the values in the JSON file. Read more