Amazon S3 Object Replication

Question

Folks, I may be reading things different, however I've been under the impression that objects and buckets in us-east do NOT get replicated automatically to us-west... However, reading the documentation, I see 2 conflicting statements:

From http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ :

Objects stored in a Region never leave the Region unless you transfer them out. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) Region never leave the EU.

However, in http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ :

s3.amazonaws.com endpoint — Amazon S3 automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

Objects stored in US Standard are replicated across multiple datacenters in the Pacific Northwest and N. Virginia, and if you access S3 with the URL endpoint that is not region specific then requests will be routed to the closest datacenter (based on our geo-ip information).

So, my question is, which is it? Do objects get automatically copied? Or do we copy objects manually between regions, then use the s3.amazonaws.com endpoint?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Clarification from AWS Support:

Sorry for the confusion there, that is the case in all regions except US Standard. All objects in US Standard are replicated across data-center facilities in the Pacific Northwest and N. Virginia. I will open a request with our documentation team to have the documentation clarified around that point.

Answer 2

That page just means that the regionless s3.amazonaws.com URL will work for any US region bucket's files. It'll send the user to the correct region's servers even though one isn't specified in the URL.

For non-US regions, you have to use the explicit region URL - trying to use s3.amazonaws.com as a URL for a file on Tokyo will just fail.