IssueTracker

During a disaster recovery simulation, my team realized that an important Cloud Storage bucket was set to a single region. When we went to update it, we learned that you currently can only set a bucket's regionality at the time of creation.

This bucket has close to 100,000 objects in it. Our current workflow to move to a multi-region bucket is quite clumsy:

1. create new multi-region bucket
2. copy all files before datestamp X from the old bucket to the new bucket
3. update our app to write to both buckets
4. once our app is definitely writing to both buckets, copy (no-clobber) all files on or after Datestamp X to the new bucket.
5. update our app again to only write to the new bucket
6. tear down old bucket

Steps 3 and 5 create a downtime. A minuscule one, but a downtime nonetheless. By being able to change the region settings on a bucket, we avoid that downtime AND strengthen the resilience of our stack. (And pay more money to Google, too. Everybody wins!)

Documentation we've consulted: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/moving-buckets