RGW (Rados Gateway) is the HTTP REST frontend to Ceph, exposing a S3 and Swift API. From the Kraken release of Ceph, RGW introduced the concept of sync modules which allows for forwarding data and metadata to an external tier. This allows for interesting analysis of metadata or archival/backup solutions without the need to support these in Ceph itself. We'll take a brief look into the design of sync modules, peer into the crystal ball for what the future holds and also cover the currently available ElasticSearch and Cloud Sync modules, which allows data to be exported to external clouds supporting a S3 like API including Amazon S3. Ceph is a distributed storage platform that is a contender to become the future of software defined storage, providing unified access to block, object and file interfaces. Rados Gateway (abbreviated RGW from here on) is the Object storage component of Ceph, exposing an all familiar S3 and Swift APIs for object storage. Since the Kraken release, RGW introduced the concept of sync modules which allows for forwarding data and metadata to an external tier. This allows for interesting analysis of metadata or archival/backup solutions without the need to support these in Ceph itself. We'll look into the basic design of sync modules, pointers to look for should you ever need to write one, cover the existing ElasticSearch & Cloud sync modules, and see what the future holds for RGW Sync modules.