Comparison
Cloud regionvsMulti-region
Cloud region
everything you run is in one geography, and a customer in another continent pays a hundred and fifty milliseconds for it.
A geographic grouping of availability zones, and the boundary most cloud services are scoped to. It determines user latency, which data residency laws apply, and what a regional outage costs you. Regions are far more independent than zones, which is what makes multi-region genuinely expensive: nothing is shared, so state has to be replicated over a slow, lossy, chargeable link.
Full entry →Multi-region
you can survive an entire region disappearing, and you now have a data replication problem in every single service.
Running in more than one region so a regional failure is survivable, or so users are served near where they are. It is the largest single step-change in architectural complexity available, because it forces a decision about consistency for every piece of state you own. Most organisations that say they need it need multi-zone and a tested restore, and the honest question is what event you are buying insurance against.
Full entry →