Introducing the Only Serverless Database for Multiple Regions and Multiple Clouds

To be competitive, your applications must be highly responsive and available anywhere, anytime. The best way to achieve this is to have a database that is geographically distributed and active-active. Unfortunately, the cost and complexity of standing up replicas of your database in multiple regions has been a significant hurdle for all but the largest enterprises —until now.

We’re excited to announce that DataStax Astra DB, the serverless, multi-cloud Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) built on Apache Cassandra®, now supports multi-region deployments. Astra DB can be deployed in multiple regions on one of three cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google). It’s serverless and employs a consumption-based pricing model that dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership, putting multi-region databases within your budget. You can easily spin up a database, scale it to multiple regions, all within a few clicks to support your disaster recovery, data sovereignty, and latency needs.

Ensure business continuity

Data replication is an important way to support a disaster recovery plan. Outages in cloud provider regions are an inescapable reality; they can lead to major business disruptions. By replicating data across regions you enable business continuity in the event of a disaster by having your app connect with a region that is still up and running.

Many countries have data sovereignty requirements, which mandate that data must reside within a particular geography. Astra DB enables you to specify whether data is replicated within a country, or replicated globally. 

With this latest release, Astra DB enables you to take advantage of an active-active architecture. Some distributed databases are active-passive, meaning that there is only one primary node that accepts writes. When a region fails, a new primary node must be chosen, which means you lose transactions. With AstraDB you can write to any region, your applications can continue to serve users in case one of the regions goes down.

Reduce latency

Latency is another key issue that multi-region Astra DB helps you solve. If your application and database is in Ireland and your end users are in the western United States, there could be several routers that your data traffic will pass through to reach the database, and this can introduce significant latency. Now you can avoid this problem by replicating the data to an Astra DB region in the western US and place the application in the same region. It’s a key way to help you deliver the most responsive customer experience.

Lower TCO

We’re knocking down one of the most significant barriers to using a multi-region database: cost. Operating any database by duplicating data across multiple regions is expensive because you're paying for fixed infrastructure. Our serverless architecture is a game changer because pricing is consumption-based. Enterprises only pay for the writes they make in these regions to duplicate the data, data transfer charge and disk storage. With serverless Astra DB, multi-region is no longer just the realm of big enterprises with big budgets—it’s within reach of any organization.

We’ve also simplified the process for configuring and managing a multi-region, distributed database. The Astra UI console reduces to just a few clicks the laborious process of setting up VMs and networking, installing software, adding users, replicating data, and setting up network policies. 

Ready to add a region? 

Log into Astra DB, select the database you want to replicate in another region and click the Add Region button as shown in this video. At this time, the Pay As You Go and Enterprise tiers will allow users to use Multi-region functionality. 

Need more information? Learn more details in our documentation.

If you’re not using Astra DB, get started without a credit card by registering for an account and use your Google or GitHub account to sign in (you can also sign up using your email address). Sign up to get 30 million reads, 4.5 million writes, and 40GB storage for free monthly ($25 credit). Alternatively, you can use your cloud marketplace credits toward Astra DB use.