A Guide For Streamlining the Process of Scaling Any Distributed Database
This guide covers scaling any distributed database––both high-level concerns and tactics to fast forward your progress.
Topics include:
- Why you should scale
- Challenges to consider before scaling
- Tools and tactics to scale your database to a multi-region deployment
Why Multi-Region Database Deployments?
While siloing data in a single region makes things easier, the strategy actually impinges on the two things you need from your database’s performance: speed and availability.
Regarding Database Speed
In 2018, computers are still bound by physics: being farther away from a service means it takes longer to communicate with it - and services will be slow if they have to communicate with a database thousands of miles away. If you need a gentle reminder as to why speed matters for your business, Google and Amazon both have oft-cited studies showing the financial implications of latency. If your site or service is slow, people will take their attention and wallets elsewhere. A simple solution: deploy your data to the regions where your users are.
Regarding Database Availability
A distributed database’s performance isn’t measured solely in ms; uptime is also a crucial factor. No matter how fast your service normally is, if it’s down, it’s worthless. To maximize the value of their services, companies and their CTOs chase down the elusive Five Nines of uptime (which amounts to no more than 26 seconds of downtime per month). Downtime can be caused by forces of nature, as we’ve seen with recent storms and earthquakes that take out an entire region. So, as the weather gets weirder, the best way to ensure your application stays up and doesn’t lose data is to distribute it far and wide. This way, your users’ data is safe even if swaths of the globe go dark.
Oh, And What About Data Localization Regulations?
While latency and uptime make great headlines, there’s another issue that requires a multi-region deployment: GDPR and the 100 plus additional data sovereignty regulations that are in place as of 2020.
These regulations are just the beginning of what will likely become a world-wide obstacle course of regulatory compliance requirements that cannot be navigated by a single region database. To comply with increasingly complex regulations, you’re left to choose from some unattractive options:
- Foregoing huge customer bases and global expansion
- Facing crippling fines
- Engineering unwieldy, complex, and potentially fragile domiciling logic in your applications
Or you could consider an option that actually presents an upside to your team:
- Using a distributed database in a multi-region deployment with data domiciling
How To Scale Your Distributed Database of Choice
In the guide, we explore the behavior of all the different kinds of distributed databases in a multi-region context. You’ll learn what kind of geographic strategy is best for your business as well as different ways to achieve optimal performance and comply with the necessary regulations.
