When to use ZONE vs. REGION survival goals

New in v21.1: Survival Goals dictate how many simultaneous failure(s) a multi-region database can survive. All tables within the same database operate with the same survival goal. Each database is allowed to have its own survival goal setting.

Allowed survival goals include:

• ZONE (default)
• REGION

Set a ZONE survival goal if:

• You can accept a single node failure up to an entire zone failure. If multiple zones fail in the same region, the database may become unavailable.

Set a REGION survival goal if:

• The database must remain available, even if a region goes down.
• You can accept the performance cost: write latency will be increased by at least as much as the round-trip time to the nearest region. Read performance will be unaffected.
• The database can be or already is configured with 3 or more database regions. At least three database regions are required to survive region failures.

See also

• Multi-region overview
• Choosing a multi-region configuration
• When to use REGIONAL vs GLOBAL tables
• Multi-region SQL performance
• Topology Patterns
• Disaster Recovery
• Migrate to Multi-region SQL