to have accounts and control the interaction between the two different service providers in these cases increased control over specific inter cluster replication and synchronization characteristics is not only desirable but necessary accordingly the multi cluster replication system has alternative embodiments that allow more discrete control over inter cluster replication and synchronization as described below fig9 shows a method 700 of specifying container synchronization targets and authorization using x container sync to and x container sync key attributes to control the container synchronization mechanism in the discussion below the information associated with the account and authorization is included in the headers of the request the data in the body of the request and the target specified via a url various embodiments of this functionality will be described relative to the u201c st u201d tool a command that generates http 1 1 compliant get post delete and similar requests similar http request functionality is available and known in the art other available mechanisms include communications protocols known in art such as without limitation rsync xmpp sip soap xml rpc or corba the method begins at step 702 including setting a first container 39 s x container sync to attribute to a second container 39 s url and the x container sync key attribute to a key value this can be achieved using the following command step 704 includes setting a second container 39 s x container sync to attribute to first container 39 s url and the x container sync key attribute to the same key value as.