Multi-Region Deployment Patterns

Deploying API7 Gateway across multiple geographic regions enables you to serve users globally with low latency and provides a robust disaster recovery solution. This page explores common multi-region deployment patterns and their configuration considerations.

Multi-Region Deployment Patterns

Choose a deployment pattern based on your availability, latency, and operational requirements.

Active-Active Deployment

In an active-active pattern, API7 Gateway is deployed and actively serves traffic in two or more regions simultaneously.

• Global Load Balancing (GSLB): Use a GSLB service (e.g., AWS Route 53, Cloudflare) to route users to the nearest healthy region based on latency or geographic proximity.
• Independent Control Planes: Each region typically has its own Control Plane and Data Plane cluster to minimize cross-region dependency.
• Data Replication: Synchronize configurations across Control Planes using ADC (API Declarative CLI) or CI/CD pipelines.

Active-Passive Deployment (Disaster Recovery)

In an active-passive pattern, one region is designated as the primary region, while the other serves as a standby.

• Failover: If the primary region fails, the GSLB service redirects all traffic to the passive standby region.
• Standby Capacity: The standby region can be maintained at a smaller scale and scaled up during a failover event.
• PostgreSQL Replication: Use PostgreSQL replication (e.g., logical replication or physical streaming replication) to keep the standby Control Plane's database in sync with the primary.

Considerations for Multi-Region

Deploying across regions introduces several challenges that must be addressed:

• Data Replication: Ensure your PostgreSQL database and any persistent storage are replicated across regions with minimal lag.
• Latency: Minimize cross-region communication between components (CP and DP) to reduce latency and improve performance.
• Configuration Consistency: Use GitOps and ADC to ensure all regions have the same gateway configurations.
• Network Connectivity: Establish secure and reliable networking between regions (e.g., VPC Peering, Transit Gateway, or VPN).

Implementation Steps

1. Regional Deployment: Deploy a complete API7 Gateway stack (CP, DP, and PostgreSQL) in each target region.
2. GSLB Configuration: Set up your global load balancer to distribute traffic across regions.
3. Database Sync: Configure PostgreSQL replication if using an active-passive pattern or a shared data model.
4. GitOps Pipeline: Implement a CI/CD pipeline to deploy the same ADC configurations to all regional Control Planes.

Next Steps

• Multi-AZ Deployment
• Hybrid Deployment with API7 Cloud
• Production Best Practices