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What are platform services?

Contributors netapp-pcarriga netapp-lhalbert

Platform services include CloudMirror replication, event notifications, and the search integration service.

If you enable platform services for S3 tenant accounts, you must configure your grid so that tenants can access the external resources necessary to use these services.

CloudMirror replication

The StorageGRID CloudMirror replication service is used to mirror specific objects from a StorageGRID bucket to a specified external destination.

For example, you might use CloudMirror replication to mirror specific customer records into Amazon S3 and then leverage AWS services to perform analytics on your data.

Note CloudMirror replication has some important similarities and differences with the cross-grid replication feature. To learn more, see Compare cross-grid replication and CloudMirror replication.
Note CloudMirror replication is not supported if the source bucket has S3 Object Lock enabled.

Notifications

Per-bucket event notifications are used to send notifications about specific actions performed on objects to a specified external Kafka cluster or Amazon Simple Notification Service.

For example, you could configure alerts to be sent to administrators about each object added to a bucket, where the objects represent log files associated with a critical system event.

Note Although event notification can be configured on a bucket with S3 Object Lock enabled, the S3 Object Lock metadata (including Retain Until Date and Legal Hold status) of the objects will not be included in the notification messages.

Search integration service

The search integration service is used to send S3 object metadata to a specified Elasticsearch index where the metadata can be searched or analyzed using the external service.

For example, you could configure your buckets to send S3 object metadata to a remote Elasticsearch service. You could then use Elasticsearch to perform searches across buckets, and perform sophisticated analyses of patterns present in your object metadata.

Note Although Elasticsearch integration can be configured on a bucket with S3 Object Lock enabled, the S3 Object Lock metadata (including Retain Until Date and Legal Hold status) of the objects will not be included in the notification messages.

Platform services give tenants the ability to use external storage resources, notification services, and search or analysis services with their data. Because the target location for platform services is typically external to your StorageGRID deployment, you must decide if you want to permit tenants to use these services. If you do, you must enable the use of platform services when you create or edit tenant accounts. You must also configure your network such that the platform services messages that tenants generate can reach their destinations.

Recommendations for using platform services

Before using platform services, be aware of the following recommendations:

  • If an S3 bucket in the StorageGRID system has both versioning and CloudMirror replication enabled, you should also enable S3 bucket versioning for the destination endpoint. This allows CloudMirror replication to generate similar object versions on the endpoint.

  • You should not use more than 100 active tenants with S3 requests requiring CloudMirror replication, notifications, and search integration. Having more than 100 active tenants can result in slower S3 client performance.

  • Requests to an endpoint that can't be completed will be queued to a maximum of 500,000 requests. This limit is equally shared among active tenants. New tenants are allowed to temporarily exceed this 500,000 limit so that newly created tenants aren't unfairly penalized.