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Why You Need a Multi-Region Deployment Strategy for Availability

Availability and reliability are crucial for modern software applications and digital services. Meeting service requirements and avoiding downtimes promote customer satisfaction, trust, and credibility. A multi-region deployment strategy can help.

Systems that are not reliable or available when needed can cause lost revenue and business, unplanned maintenance, and decreased productivity. Companies can lose up to $9,000 per minute during service downtime. On the other hand, better service reliability and availability can lead to greater competitive advantage, market share, and higher revenue. It can also allow better maintenance cost planning.

Multi-region deployment can help your organization increase performance, decrease latencies, and improve disaster recovery. Deploying to multiple regions can be more expensive than deploying to one region, but the benefits can be worth the cost.

What Is Multi-Region Deployment?

Multi-region or global deployment means deploying an application on servers that are located in multiple geographical regions. Global deployment distributes traffic and workload between locations to provide redundancy and improve performance. By placing resources in different locations, organizations can reduce the impact of failures in one specific region and improve performance for users in different parts of the world.

Benefits of Multi-Region Deployment

Some of the major benefits of multi-region deployment are:

• Redundancy and high availability: Multi-region deployment provides redundancy by spreading resources across different geographic regions. This reduces the effect of a failure in one region and increases the application’s overall availability.
• Scalability: By distributing the workload across regions, global deployment enables your organization to manage greater traffic volumes while maintaining optimal performance. It can also help to mitigate the impact of a denial-of-service attack.
• Disaster recovery: In case of a regional natural disaster or outage, your application can transfer to resources in another region and maintain operability.
• Improved user experience: By placing resources closer to users in various parts of the world, multi-region deployment decreases latency and improves responsiveness for geographically dispersed users.
• Compliance with data privacy laws and regulations: There are more than 200 data privacy and storage regulations worldwide. Many prescribe storing some sensitive data in certain physical locations. For example, the European Union’s GDPR mandates that EU citizens’ personal data can only be stored and processed in countries that have adequate data protection standards. With a proper design of your multi-region deployment strategy, you can keep data where it is supposed to be.
• Growing your application’s user base: Suppose your application servers are in North America, but your application has a small segment of users in Southeast Asia. The Asian users will likely have latencies, and their unfavorable experiences will unlikely bring new users to your application. However, by placing some servers in Asia, your Asian users will have a better experience and be more likely to encourage others to join them.

How To Set Up Multi-Region Deployment

A successful multi-region deployment strategy starts with making appropriate choices regarding architecture, traffic routing, and database deployment across the regions.

Architecture

Two major types of distributed architectures are active-active and active-passive. In active-active architectures, all regions simultaneously handle user requests and transaction processing. The benefits are high availability and scalability because all regions share the workload. This architecture is most suitable when redundancy and low latencies are needed. It requires careful synchronization to ensure consistent data and operations across the regions.

In active-passive architectures, one region acts as the primary, while the others are in standby mode until needed. These designs consume fewer resources than active-active architectures because the passive regions only run during failover situations. In case of failover, a mechanism is needed to redirect operations to one of the standby regions, and there may be some latency while the failover is being implemented.

Traffic Routing

Another consideration is how to route traffic to the different regions (when all regions are active). Some of the choices are:

• Weighted routing: Weighted routing assigns a weight to each region and enables you to distribute traffic to regions based on their weights. Some regions will take more load than others. This method is useful when some regions have more capacity or ability to take on resource-intensive tasks.
• Latency-based routing: Latency-based routing sends requests and transactions to the region with the lowest latency, enhancing the user experience by minimizing delays.
• Geolocation routing: This method directs requests to the nearest geographical location. This also improves performance by minimizing the geographical distance between the user and the server.

Database Deployment

Multi-region architecture enables you to keep copies of your database in different regions, providing data redundancy and availability.

Two issues to address are data replication and read and write affinity.

Data replication: Updates must be replicated across regions to ensure consistency. You can choose between synchronous replication, where data is replicated in real time, and asynchronous replication, which is less resource-intensive but is delayed before data is replicated between regions. The delay could be significant depending on distance and network congestion.

Read and write affinity: Another consideration is where database read and write operations are carried out. For many applications, read operations significantly outnumber writes. In these cases, read operations can be directed to the nearest region, while a central server can handle write operations.

With dozens of global probe server locations, Uptime.com’s enterprise monitoring services enable you to measure the availability and performance of your application and can help you decide whether it would benefit from multi-region deployment. Real user monitoring gives you detailed insights into your web application using user data.

Once your multi-region deployment strategy is set up, Uptime.com’s monitoring services help ensure you achieve optimal performance and user experience in each region. To learn more, try for free, or schedule a demo, visit Uptime.com.

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