Active-Active Multi-Site Object Replication
Bidirectional replication between two or more S3-compatible storage sites where all sites accept writes simultaneously, with conflict resolution ensuring eventual convergence.
Summary
Bidirectional replication between two or more S3-compatible storage sites where all sites accept writes simultaneously, with conflict resolution ensuring eventual convergence.
Active-active replication enables multi-region or multi-cloud object storage with local write performance at each site. It is the pattern for disaster recovery, data sovereignty, and geo-distributed teams — but adds conflict resolution complexity.
- Write conflicts are inevitable in active-active. Two sites writing to the same key simultaneously produce a conflict that must be resolved — typically via last-writer-wins, but this can silently drop writes.
- Replication lag means eventual consistency. Reads at one site may not reflect recent writes at another. Applications must tolerate or explicitly handle this.
depends_onCRDT — for conflict-free metadata convergenceconstrained_byGeo-Replication Conflict / Divergence — the fundamental challengescoped_toGeo / Edge Object Storage, Object Storage
Definition
Bidirectional, conflict-resolving replication between two or more S3-compatible object stores at different geographic sites, enabling read and write access at every site with eventual convergence.
Active-passive replication wastes the passive site's capacity and requires failover during outages. Active-active allows writes at all sites, maximizing utilization and providing true multi-region write capability — at the cost of conflict resolution complexity.
Multi-region write capability, low-latency global access, disaster recovery with zero RPO, distributed content publishing.
Connections 5
Outbound 4
constrained_by1Inbound 1
enables1Resources 3
MinIO multi-site replication documentation covering active-active synchronization across geographically distributed clusters.
S3 replication documentation covering cross-region replication, S3 Replication Time Control, and bi-directional replication.
Ceph multi-site documentation for active-active RADOS Gateway replication across data centers.