The Art of Data Residency and Application Architecture
Blog post from Cockroach Labs
The blog post by Paul Scanlon and Rob Reid explores the creation of Silo, a multi-region Next.js application that utilizes CockroachDB serverless and a geographically distributed Node.js API, demonstrating the advantages of a multi-region strategy in application architecture. Deployed across AWS data centers in different continents, this setup aims to optimize latency, ensure high availability, and comply with regional regulations by storing and querying data closer to users, thereby reducing transatlantic data travel. The authors discuss the challenges of single-region deployments and the benefits of pairing multi-region databases with multi-region servers, using AWS Route 53 for DNS routing and leveraging environment variables to manage data residency dynamically. By filtering data through SQL WHERE clauses and configuring CockroachDB to use regional identifiers, the application achieves low-latency access while maintaining data privacy and compliance, offering a practical example of an efficient and responsive global application.