The new AWS Melbourne Region is ready, are you?

The new Amazon Web Services Melbourne region is now live! This is the second infrastructure Region in Australia joining the AWS Sydney Region to offer customers highly secure, high performance, and the most flexible cloud infrastructure in Australia.

So what exactly does this mean for your cloud strategy and AWS architecture? And what benefits do you get from running your AWS architecture across regions and what are the implications of doing so?

Most organisations in Australia utilise the single AWS Sydney region to operate their AWS hosted workloads. For those organisations bound by compliance or reliability concerns, the opening of the AWS Melbourne region presents the first time these organisations can take advantage of cross-region architectures.

When should you consider a Multi-Region AWS Architecture?

As part of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS recommends a multi-region architecture to ensure resiliency. Multi-region architectures can make applications more resilient to disasters and improve user experience by reducing latency for a distributed workforce.

Multi-Region Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions that don’t breach local data sovereignty laws

The launch of a second region in our geography presents the capability, for Australian organisations, to implement robust DR solution ensuring they maximise the reliability of their IT services without the threat of breaching local data sovereignty laws.

Depending on the required RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective), multi-region DR solutions can be implemented for both active/passive & active/active strategies. The following architectures showcase multi region options across Sydney and Melbourne regions.

Multi-region Backup & Restore

The Multi-region Backup & Restore DR strategy has the longest RTO/RPO but is the cheapest & simplest to set up. It consists of replicating files and snapshots cross-region and using manual methods to recover the system in the alternate region.

Pilot Light & Warm Standby

Both these strategies are similar however the pilot light requires more manual interaction to activate upon a disaster. A warm standby has a cross-region architecture ready to operate, however not at the scale of production.

Multi-region Active/Active

The Multi-region Active/Active solution is perfect for mission-critical systems to ensure zero downtime, with near zero data loss.

Modern Cloud Solutions operating across AWS Regions

Going Multi-cloud does not limit the use of modern cloud solutions. In fact, modern cloud solutions embrace region-distributed architectures.

At Versent we have developed patterns to deliver highly available & secure solutions operating at five 9’s of availability & reliability utilising AWS managed container services like EKS and managed file server services like Amazon FSx.

Our multi-region production-ready EKS cluster pattern provides containerised applications with improved availability, latency, reliability, ease of use and support for disaster recovery.

Further to this, Versent’s pattern for a multi-region resilient file server uses Amazon FSx to provide access to multi-protocol datasets quickly across multiple AWS regions to meet an organisation’s performance and disaster recovery needs.

Local solutions for the Victorian Government

With the Victorian Government recently signing a government-wide cloud deal with AWS, the opening of the Melbourne AWS Region presents an ability for Victorian local government agencies to rapidly take advantage of AWS’ cloud solutions, without compromising on service reliability or local compliance laws.

Considerations for a Multi-Region architecture

Here are some considerations when choosing to implement a multi-region architecture;

• Availability of services – the Melbourne region has launched with a subset of services that are currently available in the Sydney region. You may need to architect for or re-design based upon the services available in each region.
• Latency may differ for users based upon the region the workload that’s being served from.
• The additional cost of running AWS infrastructure in two regions – not only are you required to run the same services in multiple AWS regions, but you also need to pay for data transfer and the cost to manage the architecture.
• Australian state compliance laws forbidding system usage outside of the state.
  
  

Summary

Historically, in Australia & New Zealand, Multi-Region deployments are exceptions to the norm. With the imminent launch of the new Melbourne region, Versent anticipates that organisations in Australia are going to start building their mission-critical applications to support cross-region active/active architectures.

Versent has the experience and knowledge to help guide your organisation in identifying multi-region candidates and designing and building disaster recovery and modern cloud multi-region solutions aligned to your organisation’s needs. Our multi-region disaster recovery patterns can be accessed via the AWS marketplace, ensuring your organisation can leverage our services under a procurement process that moves at the pace you need.

Get in touch and one of our consultants will reach out to chat about how you can take advantage of the new AWS Melbourne region and our AWS Marketplace offers.

Mahesh Aswani
mahesh.aswani@versent.com.au