CloudBees, Availability Zones and Disaster Recovery

Question

What is the difference between what CloudBees calls a region-specific deployment and what they (and Amazon) call an availability zone?

From what I can tell, CloudBees allows you to deploy in 1 of 2 regions/zones: USA and Europe. Are those my only options (for both region-specific deployments and availability zones)?

Is it a solid Disaster Recovery plan to have a pool of idle instances on standby deployed to the Europe "zone" in the event of a total failure of their USA data center(s)? How is DR usually handled by CloudBees clients?

Louella

Answer 1

In the US and Europe all zones are used - in each region.

A region is made up of many zones - each zone is at least one datacentre. DR inside a region is managed for you.

You could have a dual US/EU setup via various DNS based services, however the challenge then is data replication and latency/consistency trade-offs.

Isabeau

Thanks @Michael Neale (+1) - can I ask what the difference is between a zone and a region? Is it that a zone consists of 1+ regions? Where could I find the "official" DR documentation for zones and regions? Thanks again! – Louella

A region consists of many zones - a zone is made up of more than one datacentre - so a region is large. Zone failover and DR is done for you - the cross region failover/DR is a still evolving story – Isabeau