In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses require applications that are not only highly scalable but also resilient to disruptions. Users expect seamless performance, even during peak demand or unexpected failures. Multi-region architectures address these challenges by leveraging geographically distributed resources to ensure business continuity, low latency, and compliance with regional data requirements. This approach empowers organizations to deliver consistent and reliable experiences to their global user base, safeguarding their reputation and bottom line.
AWS, the leading cloud platform, provides the tools and infrastructure needed to build scalable and resilient multi-region architectures. With its extensive global footprint and robust suite of managed services, AWS simplifies the complexities of deploying and maintaining such systems. At SUDO Consultants, we specialize in helping businesses unlock AWS’s full potential. As an AWS Partner, we craft tailored solutions to meet diverse needs, ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for every deployment.
Understanding Multi-Region Architecture
A multi-region architecture entails having your application served from more than one datacenter, that are located in at least two geographically-separate regions. By having your application served from two regions, one stands to realize a number of benefits. Firstly, in case the datacenters in one region fail, the app will still operate from the other region. Secondly, applications realize reduced latency when served from a region close to the end users. Lastly, a multi-region architecture ensures that such regional regulations as data residency compliances are adhered to.
Industry Use Cases
Below are some of the industries where multi-region architectures would play a vital role in ensuring their operational excellence:
- E-commerce – a multi-region deployment of a shopping platform would ensure low latency performance and a seamless experience for the end users, even at times of regional outages.
- Financial sector – Financial services rely on multi-region setups to meet stringent compliance requirements, provide fault-tolerant transaction systems, and to maintain data sovereignty.
- Media and entertainment – Services such as video streaming and online gaming require ultra-low latency for a user-friendly experience. A multi-region deployment ensures that the content is served from the data centers nearest to the end-users, resulting in improved performance.
Core Components of a Multi-Region Application on AWS
Global Infrastructure
Figure 1: AWS Regions
The above image shows AWS Regions as deployed at the point of this writing. The ones in blue are the launched and operational Regions, whereas the ones in red are the up-coming Regions. We currently have 34 Regions in operation, with 108 Availability Zones (AZs) within them. Each AWS Region operates independently and contains multiple AZs, which are isolated data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. This design allows businesses to build fault-tolerant architectures by distributing their workloads across multiple AZs, minimizing the risk of downtime due to localized failures.
Networking and Connectivity
If an application is deployed in a multi-region setup, AWS provides the below key networking and connectivity features to ensure seamless communication and failover capabilities:
- Amazon Route 53 – This is AWS’s scalable Domain Name Service (DNS). When used in an app that is deployed across several regions, it monitors the application’s endpoints to check which regions are healthy and which are not. As such, when one of the regions is faulty, it routes traffic to the healthy regions’ endpoints only, ensuring seamless user experience.
- AWS Global Accelerator – For applications deployed across multiple regions, AWS Global Accelerator provides a high-performance and highly available global network to route user traffic to the nearest application endpoint. Global Accelerator offers near-instant failover by redirecting traffic to healthy endpoints using static IP addresses.
- VPC Peering – For the security of applications, they are deployed in logically isolated network environments called Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). These VPCs are region-specific. To facilitate private and secure communication between one VPC and another, VPC peering is set up. It is ideal for simpler architectures where not so many VPCs are in communication.
Figure 2: VPC Peering between VPC A and VPC B
- AWS Transit Gateway – Whereas VPC peering is between one VPC and another, the AWS Transit Gateway acts as a central hub for connecting multiple VPCs, as well as on-premises networks. This setup allows for a more robust multi-region networking of VPCs.
Figure 3: AWS Transit Gateway
Ensuring Resilience
Disaster Recovery Strategies
Service continuity during failures is one of the main reasons for deploying an application in multiple regions. There are two primary approaches of deploying disaster recovery (DR) strategies, these are:
- Active – active setup
In active-active setup, all regions in use are fully operational and actively handling traffic. This means that when traffic comes in, it can be routed to either of the designated regions based on such factors as utilization capacity, proximity to users, or geographical restrictions. This setup is ideal for applications that demand high availability and low latency across geographies. However, it tends to be more expensive due to the cost of running multiple regions in parallel.
- Active – passive setup
In this setup, only one region is actively handling traffic, while the others remain on a standby mode. When the active region fails, traffic is only then routed to the standby regions. Appropriate monitoring and routing configurations need to be set to the Elastic Load Balancer and Route 53 DNS in order to failover appropriately. This setup is more cost-effective as one region actively runs, as the other others stay passive and on a standby mode.
Monitoring and Logging
Effective monitoring and logging in a multi-region environment are vital for the resilience and security of the applications. To provide proactive issue detection, resolution and analysis, AWS provides a suite of resources to offer real-time insights into system performance. Two of the key ones are:
- Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch allows centralized monitoring and alarms configuration through customizable dashboards. Through setting thresholds on such metrics as CPU utilization, network activity, and memory usage, across regions, the tool notifies relevant teams for proactive actions to be taken. In a multi-region setup, CloudWatch has cross-region dashboards that provide a holistic view of the application’s health.
- AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail is an auditing tool that captures every API call made in the AWS environment across regions. Logging these activities in the cloud helps in incident analysis, identifying unauthorized access, and adherence to compliance requirements. CloudTrail integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 for storage of logs, and Amazon Athena for SQL log querying. This integration facilitates investigation of any issues across multiple AWS regions.
Building with Security in Mind
Security in the cloud, especially in a multi-region environment, requires a comprehensive approach to protect data, applications and user interactions. Lucky for us, AWS offers a vast pool of resources at our disposal.
- Multi-region IAM Best Practices
AWS recommends following the principle of least privilege, granting users and roles only the permissions necessary for their tasks. Implementing IAM policies and service control policies (SCPs) for accounts managed with AWS Organizations ensures consistent permission enforcement across regions.
- AWS KMS for Data Encryption
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) enscrypts data both at rest and in transit. Data at rest in such services as Amazon S3, DynamoDB and RDS is encrypted for storage. Data in transit, for instance when traversing regions, is encrypted using SSL/TLS certificates.
- AWS WAF and AWS Shield
To protect multi-region applications from external threats, AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) and AWS Shield are applied. AWS WAF blocks such malicious traffic as bot-based attacks, cross-site scripting (CSS) and SQL injections. AWS Shield, on the other hand, protects the cloud environment from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Applying both AWS WAF and AWS Shield across regions ensures consistent protection.
Deploying an Example Simple Multi-Region Application: A Step-by-Step Guide
We will deploy a static website (e.g., an HTML-based front-end) using Amazon EC2 instances in two regions (e.g., North Virginia and Ohio). A Global Accelerator will distribute traffic across the two regions and Amazon CloudWatch will provide monitoring.
Architecture
Figure 4: Architectural flow diagram of a simple multi-region web app
Step 1: Create VPCs and Subnets
- Set up VPCs in two regions. In our case, we’ll choose North Virginia (us-east-1) and Ohio (us-east-2).
Figure 5: VPC in us-east-1
- Create subnets:
- Public subnets in each region for EC2 instances.
Figure 6: Public subnet in us-east-1 VPC
- Enable internet access:
- Attach an Internet Gateway (IGW) to each VPC.
Figure 7: Internet GW in us-east-1
- Update route tables to allow internet traffic.
Figure 8: Route table in us-east-1
Step 2: Launch EC2 Instances
- Launch EC2 instances in both regions.
- Choose a lightweight Ubuntu Server AMI or any preferred OS.
- Install a simple web server (e.g., Apache) and upload the front-end files.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx
echo "<h1>Hello from us-east-1 </h1>" > /var/www/html/index.html- Ensure both instances are in a public subnet and associated with a security group allowing HTTP (port 80) traffic.
- Instance in us-east-1
Figure 9: EC2 instance in us-east-1
- Instance in us-east-2
Figure 10: EC2 instance in us-east-2
Step 3: Configure Elastic Load Balancer
- Create an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in each of the regions.
- Add the corresponding EC2 instance from each of the region as an endpoint to that region’s ALB.
- Use the Target Groups feature to include the instances by their IPs.
N.B: Target Groups are region-specific. Each ALB only connects to the Target Group in its region.
- Configure health checks to ensure only healthy instances serve traffic.
Figure 11: Target group for ALB in us-east-1
Step 4: Configure Global Accelerator in one region
Since there are now 2 ALBs (one in each of the regions), we need to create a Global Accelerator that routes traffic to both the ALBs.
- Navigate to Global Accelerator in the AWS Management Console.
- Create an accelerator and add endpoints as the two regional ALBs.
- Configure Listener and Routing
- Add a listener to the Global Accelerator that routes traffic to the regional ALBs.
- Global Accelerator automatically routes traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint. Ensure the status of reads “healthy”, otherwise the endpoints won’t be accessible.
Figure 12: Global Accelerator
Step 5: Testing the Setup
- Access the App: Open a browser and navigate to the domain name associated with your Global Accelerator. Verify that the app serves content from at least one of the regions.
- In this example, traffic was routed to the instance in us-east-1 region as shown in the image below.
- Simulate Traffic Failover: Test traffic failover by stopping one EC2 instance and observing traffic redirection to the healthy region.
- In this case, by stopping the EC2 instance in us-east-1, traffic got automatically redirected to the us-east-2 instance.
Step 6: Monitoring and Logging
- Amazon CloudWatch Metrics:
- Monitor the health of the Global Accelerator, EC2 instances, and network traffic.
N.B: The health of one endpoint should show an unhealthy status, when one of the EC2 instances is stopped.
Figure 13: Health status of Global Accelerator
- Configure CloudWatch Alarms to notify you of any issues (e.g., high latency or failed health checks).
- Enable Logging:
- Use CloudWatch Logs to collect and analyze log data from EC2 instances.
Conclusion
This simple multi-region deployment ensures an active-active architecture with improved availability and resilience. The architecture distributes traffic across regions using a Global Accelerator and monitors application health and performance through CloudWatch. The lightweight setup is suitable for basic use cases and can be expanded for more complex needs.
SUDO Consultants for Your AWS Multi-Region Architecture
At SUDO Consultants, we pride ourselves on our deep expertise in designing and deploying AWS multi-region architectures that deliver scalability, resilience, and exceptional performance. As an AWS Partner, our team has successfully implemented complex multi-region solutions across various industries, ensuring minimal downtime, optimal user experiences, and seamless disaster recovery. Our proven methodologies and hands-on experience with AWS services like Route 53, Elastic Load Balancer, and RDS Global Database make us the go-to partner for businesses seeking reliable and future-ready cloud solutions.
What sets SUDO Consultants apart is our commitment to personalization. We understand that every business has unique goals and challenges, so we tailor our solutions to fit your specific needs. Whether you’re looking to optimize costs, enhance performance, or ensure compliance, our architects work closely with you to deliver a strategy that aligns with your objectives. With SUDO Consultants, you’re not just adopting cloud technology—you’re unlocking its full potential to drive your business forward.
