Topology Patterns Overview

This section provides recommended patterns for running CockroachDB in a cloud environment.

Single-region

When your clients are in a single geographic region, choosing a pattern is straightforward.

Deployment Type	Latency	Resiliency	Configuration
Development	Fast reads and writes	None	1 node No replication
Basic Production	Fast reads and writes	1 zone failure	1 region 3 zones 3+ nodes across zones

Multi-region

When your clients are in multiple geographic regions, it is important to deploy your cluster across regions properly and then carefully choose:

1. The right survival goal for each database.
2. The right table locality for each of your tables.

Not doing so can result in unexpected latency and resiliency. For more information, see the Multi-Region Capabilities Overview.

Pattern	Latency
Regional Tables	Low latency for single-region writes and multi-region stale reads.
Global Tables	Low-latency multi-region reads from all regions, at the expense of higher latency cross-region writes.
Follower Reads	Fast regional (historical) reads, slower cross-region writes.
Follow-the-Workload	Fast regional reads in the active region; slower cross-region reads elsewhere. Slower cross-region writes.

Anti-patterns

The following anti-patterns are ineffective or risky:

• Single-region deployments using 2 zones, or multi-region deployments using 2 regions. In these cases, the cluster would be unable to survive the loss of a single zone or a single region, respectively.
• Broadly distributed multi-region deployments (e.g., us-west, asia, and europe) using only the default Follow-the-Workload behavior. In this case, latency will likely be unacceptably high.

See also

• Multi-Region Capabilities Overview
• Choosing a multi-region configuration
• When to use ZONE vs. REGION survival goals
• When to use REGIONAL vs. GLOBAL tables
• Multi-region SQL performance
• Migrate to Multi-region SQL
• ALTER DATABASE ... SURVIVE {ZONE,REGION} FAILURE
• ALTER TABLE ... SET LOCALITY ...
• Topology Patterns Overview
  • Single-region
    • Development
    • Basic Production
  • Multi-region
    • REGIONAL Table Locality Pattern
    • GLOBAL Table Locality Pattern
    • Follow-the-Workload