TECHNIQUE FOR MANAGING MULTIPLE SNAPSHOT STORAGE SERVICE INSTANCES ON-DEMAND

A technique allows instantiation and running on demand of long-term snapshot storage services of an archival storage system at various geographical locations. Storage service instances are configured to provide storage and retrieval of large amounts of point-in-time images or snapshots (e.g., recovery points) of application workloads stored as objects on one or more buckets of a shared object store. The storage service instances may contemporaneously serve snapshots of a same set of buckets on the shared object store without interfering with each other in a contention-free manner. That is, the technique enables storage service instances that are associated with snapshot workload data and/or metadata stored, e.g., as objects of a recovery point, on the same set of buckets to coexist without knowledge of each other. The storage service instances can be created and destroyed on-demand by splitting and merging the existing instances.