Understanding Multi-Region Application Architecture

Chapter 3. Global Applications

It has never been simpler to deploy applications to physical locations around the world. Whether you’re hand-rolling your infrastructure with a CSP or using Fly.io, Render, Railway, Vercel, Netlify, etc., it’s possible to reach your customers right where they are, wherever they are. From here on in, I’ll refer to these services collectively as application hosting platforms (AHPs).

In this chapter, we’ll take a high-level look at global application architecture and the things you’ll need to consider to benefit from the technology available.

Considerations When Creating a Global Application

The challenges of deploying an application globally are similar to those we encountered when deploying a database globally. For this chapter, I’ll assume that the database contains all state while the applications are entirely stateless. This may not reflect your applications perfectly, but when you’re wielding a global database, you can allow it to do more of the heavy, stateful lifting. That way, we can treat our application as a vehicle to accessing the database and don’t need to create cross-region interconnectivity as we would with a global database.

Whether you choose to use a CSP or an AHP, you’ll need to consider a host of variables to use them effectively. We’ll start by looking at some shared considerations for both CSPs and AHPs, then explore specific considerations to each. Shared considerations:

Vendor lock-in

Deciding to host your application in ...