Hi folks, I've deprecated S3_PING [1] and GOOGLE_PING [3]. The replacements are NATIVE_S3_PING [2] and GOOGLE_PING2 [4]. S3_PING started out as a copy of sample code by Amazon a long time ago, and - because I never wanted Amazon's dependencies - is quite fat, as it contains a bunch of dependent classes. While Amazon's client code has evolved and become more robust, S3_PING has never changed much, so I suspect it contains a number of bugs and is possibly also not very efficient. GOOGLE_PING is a subclass of S3_PING and uses Google's AWS compatibility library. Thus, GOOGLE_PING inherits all of S3_PING's deficiencies. A couple of week's ago, I therefore created NATIVE_S3_PING (a port of Zalando's original protocol of the same name for 3.x), which uses the AWS client SDK to access S3 storage. This week, I also committed a first version of GOOGLE_PING2, which doe not extend S3_PING any longer, but instead uses Google's client library to access Google Cloud Storage directly. The benefit of using an official client library instead of the copy&paste kludge that's called S3_PING is that client libs are maintained / updated / offer new functionality / yada yada yada. Since both protocols have depedencies, they're located in the jgroups-extras repo (https://github.com/jgroups-extras). I want to core JGroups repo to be free of any dependencies. S3_PING and GOOGLE_PING will be removed from JGroups in the next major version (5.x). If you have any concerns that functionality currently present in either S3_PING or GOOGLE_PING is not available in NATIVE_S3_PING or GOOGLE_PING2, let me know. Cheers, [1] http://www.jgroups.org/manual4/index.html#_s3_ping [2] https://github.com/jgroups-extras/native-s3-ping [3] http://www.jgroups.org/manual4/index.html#_google_ping [4] https://github.com/jgroups-extras/jgroups-google