As I began writing this article, I encountered some technical challenges in my attempt to provision three cloud providers in three separate regions to simulate multi-cloud and multi-region deployments.
I couldn’t get one of the regions to behave as I expected when provisioning the environment. As it turned out, the region (and by association, cloud) was down due to a cut undersea cable, and it would take several weeks until the outage was mitigated.
Fortunately, there are plenty of clouds in the sky to choose from, but this experience emphasized the importance of multi-cloud redundancy, especially in a production environment.
This article examines the benefits of adopting a multi-region and multi-cloud deployment strategy for better resiliency, regulatory compliance and optimal user experience.
Resilient Reasons to Choose Multi-Cloud and Multi-Region Architectures
The first reason to choose a multi-cloud or multi-region environment is for data resilience. When our data is in a single region or on a single cluster, there is a good chance that you will experience data failure. You need a mitigation strategy if you want to keep the data lights on 24/7. These strategies fall into two buckets: Multi-region and multi-cloud.
We first need to define the differences between multi-cloud and multi-region. The architectures are simply the implementation details of how we plan for one versus the other. However, depending on your database provider, those details can represent a significant time investment, which we’ll look at later.
Multi-Region
With multi-region, we typically deploy our applications to globally distributed regions. However, regional deploys are subjected to physical faults. Inclement weather, political unrest, acts of foreign or domestic terrorism and other physical variables have all led to regional outages in the past.
Regardless of the cloud, the regions are exposed to similar physical faults. Instead of losing your data, we can switch to another region to handle the workload. Even though much as our industry hates latency, it is always preferred over loss.
Deploying to multiple regions allows for failover handling. If the Sydney region goes down, Singapore may still be online. It would be a globally bad day if the same physical faults simultaneously impacted Frankfurt, Sydney and Seattle, for example.
Multi-Cloud
Physical faults are only one of the problems that public and private clouds encounter. User error, poorly configured networks and even banal errors can have substantial consequences that impact entire clouds, either from the provider or the user.
In these circumstances, regional failover won’t help you. An expired certificate, accidental deletion or disabling the wrong port will take you offline, regardless of whether you’re in Seattle or Sydney. If that happens, someone somewhere is most definitely awake and is likely very unhappy.
Choosing a multi-cloud configuration protects you from these types of faults so that if Google, for example, has interruptions, AWS is still online—or IBM, Deutsche Telekom, OVH or Hetzner.
The Correct Answer: Deploy Both!
Multi-region is a go-to method to mitigate against mostly physical faults. Multi-node clusters in each of those regions handle general data corruption or failures on a more granular level.
Multi-cloud is a go-to method to mitigate configuration or software-level faults, which are not that uncommon.
The correct answer is to blend the two, working within operational cost constraints and general survivable requirements from regulatory and business objective use cases. For example, I do want access to my heart-rate data from two years ago, but the order of browsing across Amazon shopping is less important.
Regulatory Reasons for Multi-Region Architecture
Apart from data resiliency, most companies serving a global market are subject to a number of geopolitical influences, as well. Most users will be familiar with the GDPR regulations ensuring European data stays on European soil. Further regulations require the ability for government oversight to request data at will from service providers, which requires its own set of reasonable isolation from those not in those jurisdictions.
Using a multi-region database provider allows companies to ship single binaries of software without creating isolated applications for different countries—a practice that was the norm not too many years ago.
Performant Reasons for Multi-Region Architecture
Co-locating data and access provides the optimal pathway for getting a user’s data to the end destination. It goes without saying, but the less copper your data has to traverse, the faster the experience will be for your users. Retention and regulation aside, in many cases, you need to mitigate latency caused by region separation.
It’s not just the individual user’s data. Imagine a sales enablement platform where an account executive needs to manage all of APAC or EMEA. If these accounts are optimally stored for reads on geo boundaries, you can remove seconds of delay between page navigations for your account manager. We all know how much account executives like to click!
Choosing a DB Provider With Multi-Region and Multi-Cloud
At this point, you should be convinced of the benefits of multi-region and multi-cloud deployments. But at what cost? Creating replication, failover, logging and synchronization mechanisms is a big, expensive ask. Even with deployment tooling, coordinating all the pieces for multi-region deploys is still a significant operational lift, let alone multi-cloud, where variables in APIs come into play.
Choosing a single provider that deploys across regions and clouds means you get to benefit from their collective experience while reducing a significant burden.
Having a database provider offer one-click multi-region deploys is the way to go, but you still need to handle the data access layer. The role-based access, federation and other settings that enable your developers still need to be distributed along with the underlying data sources.
You need a provider that makes it simple to deploy the same configuration for horizontally scaled instances, leaving you to pick your geo router of choice to distribute the request to the nearest point of presence.
Closing
Multi-cloud and multi-region deployments provide significant redundancy, scalability and flexibility. Not only does this enable faster access times and improved reliability, but also provides the flexibility required to adapt to disruptions or unpredictable increases in traffic.
Deploying multi-cloud and multi-region is no small feat–but the peace of mind and security it provides make it worth the effort.
