Two regions or two clouds, designed to work as one
Run production across two regions or two providers, such as AWS me-central-1 and Azure UAE North, so one outage does not take you down.
Overview
Running in two places is mostly a data problem. Compute is easy to copy. Databases, sessions, queues and identity are not. We design how data moves between sites, what consistency you accept, and how traffic is routed when one side fails.
For UAE companies that must keep data in-country, the practical pairing is often AWS me-central-1 with Azure UAE North. For European companies it is usually two EU regions of one provider. We build the setup in your own accounts and keep it as simple as your recovery targets allow.
Signs you need this
- Every production database has its only writable copy in one region
- Customers or regulators have asked where you would run if your region failed
- Your Terraform assumes one provider and one region throughout
- DNS changes during an incident are manual and untested
What you get
- Topology decision record
- Active-passive, warm standby or active-active, chosen per workload, with the trade-offs in cost, latency and consistency written down.
- Data replication design
- How each database, object store and queue is replicated, which side is authoritative, and how conflicts or lag are handled.
- Second site in code
- Terraform modules that deploy the same platform to both regions or both providers from one pipeline.
- Traffic routing
- Health-checked DNS or global load balancing with tested failover rules and sensible time-to-live values.
- Cross-cloud identity and networking
- Private connectivity, workload identity federation and secrets handling that work the same way on both sides.
- Operating guide
- How to deploy, monitor and switch between sites, written for the engineers who will run it.
How the work runs
- 1
Workload triage
1 to 2 weeks
Sort services by how much downtime and data loss they can take, and decide which need a second site at all.
- 2
Architecture design
2 to 3 weeks
Design data flows, networking and identity across sites, and confirm residency constraints for each data set.
- 3
Build the second site
4 to 8 weeks
Extend infrastructure code, set up replication and private links, and deploy the workloads to the new site.
- 4
Switch-over testing
1 to 2 weeks
Shift real traffic between sites in controlled steps and confirm data integrity after each move.
Timings depend on the size of your estate. The assessment fixes them before any build starts.
What you can check afterwards
- Production traffic served from the second site during a planned switch, with no data lost
- One pipeline that deploys the same release to both sites
- A written map showing exactly which data lives where, for your residency records
- Health checks that move traffic automatically when a site stops responding
Tools we work with
- AWS me-central-1
- Azure UAE North
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- Amazon Route 53
- Azure Front Door
- Cloudflare
- PostgreSQL logical replication
- Amazon S3 Replication
- HashiCorp Vault
- Argo CD
Questions buyers ask
- Is multi-cloud worth the extra complexity?
- Only when a single provider has no second region that meets your data rules, or when a provider-wide failure is a real risk for you. Otherwise two regions of one provider is simpler and we will say so.
- Do we need to rewrite our application?
- Usually not. Most changes are in configuration, data replication and how the app finds its database, though stateful components sometimes need small code changes we will point out early.
- Where does the work happen?
- In your own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud accounts and your repositories. We do not host anything on your behalf.
- Will our cloud bill go up?
- Yes, a second site has a running cost. We size it to your recovery targets, for example a smaller warm standby that scales up on failover, and show you the trade-off before building.
Talk to us about multi-region and multi-cloud architecture.
Tell us what you run and where. We reply within one business day with questions or a quote.