A system and method for generating replication requests for objects in a distributed storage system is provided. For a respective object in a distributed storage system the following is performed. Replication policies for the object that have not been satisfied are determined. Replication requests are ranked for the object whose replication policies have not been satisfied based on a number of replicas of the object that need to be created in order to satisfy the replication policies for the object. Replication requests are generated for the object based at least in part on the replication policies for the object that have not been satisfied and on a current state of the distributed storage system. At least a subset of the replication requests for the objects in the distributed storage system are distributed to respective instances of the distributed storage system corresponding to the replication requests for execution.