Moving to a multi-region active-active architecture on AWS

The solution is built using Route53 routing policies, regional API Gateways, Multi AZ EC2s, RabbitMQ and AWS MySQL Aurora databases

We can all agree that resiliency and reliability are of huge importance when designing and building a service. At my current organization, our REST APIs are used to onboard IoT devices and help these devices stay connected to the WiFi. Clearly, this is a service that requires the highest uptime possible.

Here’s our journey from moving to a single region cloud architecture to a multi-region active-active cloud architecture.

Why Multi-Region?

Our reasons for moving to a multi-region architecture were pretty much the same as everyone else's:

• Reducing latency for our European customers
• Being in compliance to their data storage needs
• Enable regional failover

Which approach?

There are many architectural approaches to going multi-region.

1. Totally separate data-centers — Each customer will get a unique url (eu1.<service>.com) and all data resides in this data center