Geo-distributed applications are designed to work across multiple availability zones and regions, ensuring high-availability, performance, and compliance. To design and implement such applications, software engineers need to select the right components from the beginning, considering distribution across distant locations and scalability horizontally. The key steps involve deploying application instances across zones and regions, configuring a distributed API layer, deploying a distributed database, enabling a global cloud load balancer, and running and testing the application. A geo-distributed application must withstand various cloud outages, serve user requests at low latency regardless of user location, and comply with data residency requirements.