Single and Multi-Region Availability

By default, Unqork creates single-region environments. These environments span multiple availability zones (AZs) to provide high availability and redundancy in one region. Static assets, attachments, and the database layer are distributed across AZs in the same region. Traffic is distributed among healthy Unqork instances.

The diagram below displays a single-region environment. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) routes traffic from end-users to healthy Unqork instances in two separate AZs.

Single-region environments are not resilient to regional cloud provider outages. If the region goes down, the environment goes down. Multi-region environments address this.

Multi-Region Environments

Multi-region environments span multiple AWS regions and multiple AZs in an active-active configuration. Either region can continue serving traffic if the other becomes unavailable. Each region includes multiple Unqork instances across AZs. Static assets, attachments, and database contents replicate across regions.

AWS Route 53, the global load balancer, directs clients to the best-performing healthy region. Each region then has its own ALB that distributes traffic among healthy Unqork instances in that region.

The diagram below displays a multi-region environment. Route 53 evaluates region health and performance, then routes traffic to the appropriate regional ALB.

Multi-Region Considerations

Before setting up or upgrading to a multi-region environment, consider the following:

• Unqork only supports multi-region environments on AWS.

  To see which AWS regions support multi-region deployment, see Cloud Service Providers: Supported Regions.

• Unqork supports multi-region configurations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

• Regions should be near each other to keep data replication latency low.

• Existing single-region environments built on Kubernetes can be upgraded to include a second cluster in a different region. The new region gets a new set of Unqork  addresses to add to IP allowlists.

• All environments in a stack should share the same topology. This keeps environments as production-like as possible across the full software development lifecycle.

• Upgrading from single-region to multi-region might require downtime.

• Additional costs apply when upgrading to a multi-region environment.

For more information, contact a Customer Success Manager.

Multi-Region Limitations

Before setting up or upgrading to a multi-region environment, note the following:

• Regions must use the same cloud provider. Unqork currently supports AWS commercial regions only.

• Multi-region is not available on Azure or AWS GovCloud regions.

• Audit logging is not available in multi-region environments.

• WORM storage is not available in multi-region environments.