Geo-redundancy is the distribution of mission-critical components or infrastructures, such as servers, across multiple data centers that reside in different geographic locations1. Geo-redundancy acts as a safety net in case the primary site fails or in the event of a disaster or an outage that impacts an entire region1. Geo-redundancy also reduces latency and ensures close proximity to end users by delivering web content from the nearest data center2. Geo-redundancy is a common feature of cloud computing, as it provides high availability, reliability, and performance for cloud applications and services2.
Replication is the process of copying data from one location to another, such as from a primary site to a secondary site, or from one cloud provider to another3. Replication is a necessary but not sufficient condition for geo-redundancy, as it does not guarantee that the replicated data is accessible or consistent across different regions3. Replication can also introduce operational complexity and data synchronization issues3.
Zones are logical or physical partitions of a cloud provider’s infrastructure that offer high availability and fault tolerance within a region4. Zones are usually located in the same or nearby data centers, and are connected by low-latency network links4. Zones can help distribute the workload and prevent single points of failure, but they do not provide geo-redundancy, as they are still vulnerable to regional outages or disasters4.
Backup is the process of creating and storing copies of data for the purpose of recovery in case of data loss or corruption5. Backup is an important part of data protection and disaster recovery, but it does not provide geo-redundancy, as it does not ensure that the backup data is available or up-to-date in different regions5. Backup can also have longer recovery time and higher cost than geo-redundancy5. References: Use geo-redundancy to design highly available applications; Geo Redundancy Explained | Cloudify; Georedundancy - Open Telekom Cloud; Why geo-redundancy for cloud infrastructure is a ‘must have’; Geo-Redundancy: Why Is It So Important? | Unitrends.
