Comment by donavanm

> The amount of data S3 stores "automatically replicating" to other geographical locations would make things prohibitively expensive

It did work like this! And it was! My recollection is that the first S3 was out of SEA and had no user concept of region. Then “VDC” was added in virginia. That provided API endpoints in what became us-east-1. A bucket could be accessed from either location, and the original intent was for object store to replicate between them. By the time dub/eu-west-1 came along that was obviously not tenable; itd take 10s of gbs to replicate.

So S3 became regional. But the original sea/vdc deployments still had shared APIs and data in both regions. Your object would be stored in the region of the API you geolocated to via DNS, but read from either. _eventually_ all the data migrated to IAD, but those API endpoints were transparently proxying across the continent until 2013 or so.

And of course glacier had much more interesting takes on this with cross dc/az/region erasure encoding. But i dont think any of the wacky multi dimensional cross region stuff ever materialised in practice.

PS: hi!