Preview: Intro to Multi-Region Databases in Geo-distributed Applications

Course Number
intro-to-multi-region
Self-Paced
Estimated Effort
2 hrs/week

About This Course

A geographically distributed audience introduces problems such as speed of light latency. Data takes time to get to your users. This can result in a good experience for users near the data source but a poor experience for those further away. Using a geographically distributed database can help remedy this problem by locating the source of the data closer to the users, no matter where they are in the world.

Operating in different geographies could also require new data locality considerations - think data domiciling. More sophisticated approaches are needed to overcome these challenges; however, that doesn’t mean your solution must be difficult to understand or implement.

This course will introduce simple, elegant, and practical solutions for designing a database that optimizes for resilience, responsiveness while also being sensitive to data locality.

Prerequisites

Students should be familiar with the following concepts:

CockroachDB clusters, forming quorums and consensus
Data distribution and replication in CockroachDB
Cloud topology terms - Region & Availability Zone

A good prerequisite course for this is Intro to Distributed SQL and CockroachDB

Detailed course outline

Course Introduction

Video: Why take this course?
Video: Fictional business use case

Setting up your environment

Video: Introducing the demo environment
Setup: Development environment
Exercise: Exploring CockroachDB demo & MovR

Geographically distributed databases

Video: What is a geographically distributed database?
Video: Multi-region challenges
Exercise 01: Topology planning
Exercise 02: A demonstration of poor resilience (region failure)
Quiz: Geographically distributed databases

Getting started with implementation

Video: Implementing a multi-region database architecture
Exercise 03: How can I implement multiple regions
Note: Explaining the run script

Achieving high resilience with multi-region databases

Video: Resilience overview
Quiz: Resilience overview

Intro to survival goals in CockroachDB

Video: Survival goals overview
Exercise 04: Identify appropriate survival goals

Survival goals deep-dive

Video: Zone survival goals
Quiz: Zone survival goals
Video: Region survival goals
Quiz: Region survival goals

An overview of latency in multi-region databases

Video: Latency in Cockroachdb multi-region

Tuning latency in multi-region databases

Video: Global tables
Exercise 05: Case for global table
Video: Regional-by-row tables
Exercise 06: Case for regional-by-row
Video: Regional tables
Exercise 07: Case for a regional table

Summary of latency in multi-region database deployments

Video: Summary of multi-region latency concepts
Quiz: Optimizing for low latency in multi-region deployments

Data docmiciling with CockroachDB

Video: Fitting into your data domiciling strategy
Video: Data domiciling syntax
Exercise 08: Data domiciling and "Placement Restricted"
Quiz: Data domiciling

Multi-region design tradeoffs

Video: Multi-region tradeoffs
Exercise: What are the tradeoffs?
Quiz: Tradeoffs

Summary

Course Staff

Kiki Carter

Sr. Staff Curriculum Developer @ Cockroach Labs

Kiki is a leader and lover of cloud-native architecture, advocacy, and delivery. She enjoys transforming heritage platforms into massive scaling, high-throughput, low latency systems. Kiki thrives on cultivating successful environments through creative exploration of developer experience, training, and delivery discipline. Kiki is also passionate about computer ethics and the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.

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