Cross-Region Replication Cost Explosion

A replication-policy change applied last week widened cross-region fan-out and switched every data class — critical, standard, and low-priority alike — to synchronous replication across US, EU, and APAC. Freshness is excellent across every class and nothing is currently failing, but cross-region transfer cost, replication fan-out, and storage-duplication cost have all risen sharply and show no sign of coming back down on their own. Critical data (e.g. ledger/account-state records) must retain its mandated 3-region durability floor at all times — a cost optimization must never silently weaken this disaster-recovery guarantee below policy. Freshness requirements genuinely differ by dataset class, and not all data requires full active replication to every region: archived and low-priority data may use slower, narrower replication where explicitly allowed. Bring cost back to a sustainable level without ever breaching the durability floor the business depends on.

Difficulty

Senior Staff

Expected Time

~20 min

Category

Infrastructure & Capacity