Support AWS PrivateLink for S3 bucket in Spectrum Protect

We use AWS PrivateLink, which allows AWS customers to send data to S3 over a site-to-site VPN and their VPC, instead of going over the public internet. AWS PrivateLink works by giving customers a personalized DNS address, which can be used to access S3 through their VPC (e.g. https://bucket.vpce-0164d952361bdcecd-55by8nmb.s3.us-east-1.vpce.amazonaws.com).

This is currently not supported in Spectrum Protect, since it does not match the usual Amazon AWS S3 endpoint URLs (e.g. https://s3-us-east-1.amazonaws.com). The issue is further documented at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6498565. Spectrum Protect appears to parse the URL to determine the 'region' to use with the S3 API. It attempts to use region 'vpce' in this case, which is not valid.

I would like to request an RFE for Spectrum Protect to support using AWS PrivateLink endpoint URLs. I think this could be accomplished one of two ways:

1) Update the URL parsing logic to recognize vpce URLs, and parse them appropriately, pulling out the region correctly.

2) Update the 'define/update stgpool' commands for cloud pools to support a hardcoded region option. This would be used if specified, otherwise you could fall back to URL parsing as has been done in the past. For example:

update stgpool my-aws-pool cloudurl=https://<my-vpce-url> region=us-east-1 identity=<user> password=<pass> bucketname=my-bucket

Option (2) is preferred in my opinion. Not only does it solve the issue, but it future proofs Spectrum Protect for other workflows which AWS may introduce. As long as a 'cloudurl' reaches S3, it doesn't matter if it's a IP, internal DNS CNAME, etc.., the region will be set correctly.