IBM Cloud is the ideal platform for your mission-critical applications

IBM Cloud now has eighteen availability zones in six regions across the globe, located in the United States (Dallas and Washington, DC), Germany, UK, Japan, and Australia. These regions provide a full cloud service stack that enables highly available, redundant, and geographically dispersed customer solutions. This architecture provides the foundation you need to build and deploy your mission-critical applications in the cloud. The multiple zone and region model enable three important capabilities:

1. Uniformity and consistency of cloud services between locations
2. Improved resiliency and availability of the cloud platform and infrastructure
3. Region and zone-aware services

1. Uniformity and consistency

IBM Cloud regions that support availability zones provide the same set of services in each zone. Customers can create solutions that can be scaled within a region and replicated into other regions. For applications that need to be zone-aware or scale across two or more zones, identical infrastructure capabilities make it easier to plan, develop, and deploy enterprise solutions. For a list of what services are available in any availability zone, please see “What cloud services can you expect to find in IBM Cloud Availability Zones?“

2. Resiliency and availability

Applications deployed across multiple availability zones or regions can expect increased availability and fault tolerance when compared to running in one zone or region. Business-critical applications can now be hosted with confidence on the cloud.

3. Regional and zone-aware services

Virtual server instances and bare metal servers are now available in each of the availability zones. You can use them directly to host your applications or chose to leverage the IBM services that are built on top of this base infrastructure. For example, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, which provides managed container services, leverages these new capabilities to enable customers to deploy clusters across multiple zones and regions.

In turn, many IBM Cloud services take advantage of these new IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service capabilities to improve their own availability. For example:

• IBM Cloudant database is deployed across three availability zones per region.
• IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) leverages multi-zone capabilities and is available in all regions.
• Services foundational to the IBM Cloud platform (e.g., Identity and Access Management, IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA) are deployed in all regions and exposed to applications as global highly resilient services.

Your application can not only take advantage of these IBM services but can also be spread out geographically, maximizing your applications’ resilience.

How can your applications take advantage of availability zones?

With the increased number of availability zones in a given region, IBM Cloud now delivers enhanced enterprise capabilities for cloud applications:

Getting started

One of the easiest ways to get started is to follow one of our solution tutorials. As an example of the first use case above, the Resilient and secure multi-region Kubernetes clusters with Cloud Internet Services tutorial lays out the steps you can take to create a highly resilient and secure application environment leveraging the benefits of multiple IBM Cloud regions and availability zones: