Connector Improvement: Support Polaris workers in us-west-2 (and other AWS regions) to eliminate cross-region transfer costs
AnsweredWe operate our entire AWS infrastructure in us-west-2 — S3 buckets, EKS clusters, data warehouse, and all downstream consumers. Our Fivetran Delta Lake destination is also configured for us-west-2.
However, since Polaris workers only run in us-east-1, every byte Fivetran writes to our S3 bucket crosses regions. This creates two unnecessary cost centers on our AWS bill:
-
Cross-region data transfer: Significant monthly
USW2-USE1-AWS-Out-Bytescharges, purely from Fivetran's Polaris workers in us-east-1 accessing our us-west-2 bucket. -
Cross-region API request overhead: We traced via CloudTrail that our Fivetran role generates tens of thousands of
AssumeRolecalls per day from us-east-1, all with thehll/cross-regionuser-agent flag — confirming the workers are operating cross-region.
These costs are entirely avoidable if Polaris workers were co-located with the destination. We can't move our destination to us-east-1 because the rest of our stack is in us-west-2 — moving the bucket would just shift the cross-region costs to our own read path instead.
Request: Deploy Polaris workers in us-west-2 (and ideally all regions where S3 destinations are supported) so that data processing happens in the same region as the destination bucket.
Business impact:
- Would immediately eliminate hundreds of dollars per month in AWS cross-region transfer fees for us
- Would reduce S3 API latency for Fivetran syncs (same-region calls are faster)
- Likely affects all customers whose Delta Lake destinations are outside us-east-1
- Aligns with the destination's configured "Cloud region" setting in the Fivetran UI, which currently says us-west-2 but doesn't actually control where Polaris workers execute
Evidence provided in support ticket: CloudTrail logs showing sts:AssumeRole from us-east-1 IPs, hll/cross-region user-agent flags, and S3 data transfer billing breakdowns.
-
Official comment
Thanks Max for raising this to our attention.
In the setup form there is a drop down for AWS Region. This dictates where Fivetran deploys resources (including Catalog). This level of granularity in deployment is a Business Critical capability.
More details about how Fivetran defaults regionality of data/processing can be found https://fivetran.com/docs/privacy#fivetrandataresidency
-
@casey, I see this on the destination page.
We have an enterprise contract (not sure if that includes business critical), I created this feature request from recommendation from your support team (#368918).
Should I be able to select the region with our contract?
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
2 comments