Explore OVHcloud's deployment modes.
OVHcloud offers several deployment models to meet different requirements for resilience, availability, performance, and latency. This guide provides an overview of the main features of the available deployment options: 1-AZ and Local Zones. It details their specific features, benefits, and limitations to help you make the best strategic choices for your cloud deployments.
By offering a clear, detailed comparison, this guide will enable users to make an informed decision based on their specific priorities, whether it's ensuring high availability for critical applications, minimizing costs while maintaining fault tolerance, or meeting local compliance and ultra-low-latency requirements.
Additionally, we will highlight the real-world challenges users may face, including impacts on business continuity, service scalability, and cost management, for each deployment mode. This guide is particularly useful for cloud architects, IT managers, and developers looking to optimize their infrastructure based on specific business and technical needs.
Concepts
What is an AZ?
An Availability Zone (AZ) is a unit of infrastructure comprising one or more isolated data centers located in a specific geographic region where public cloud services are hosted and operated.
OVHcloud provides a robust and adaptable infrastructure, designed to meet a wide variety of use cases through deployment models that balance cost-effectiveness, redundancy, and fault tolerance. These different options allow users to choose the approach best suited to their resilience, availability, and performance requirements.
- 1-AZ Region: These single-zone regions are ideal for workloads where cost optimization is a priority. They are ideally suited for general needs such as storage, backup, or applications whose availability requirements do not require redundancy. They offer a good compromise between reliability, performance, and cost control.
- Local Zones: These infrastructures are specifically designed to meet needs requiring ultra-low latency or strict geographical constraints. By placing resources close to end-users, Local Zones are ideal for use cases such as high-end computing, video games, content delivery, or solutions requiring local regulatory compliance.
Each of these options is based on the fundamental principles of resilience, performance, and fault tolerance.
Deployment modes
OVHcloud offers different deployment models designed to meet the varying needs of businesses, with varying levels of redundancy, fault tolerance, and geographical distribution. These options provide flexibility, scalability, and resilience, enabling customers to align their infrastructure with their operational and strategic priorities.
1-AZ Region
Infrastructure and Redundancy
A 1-AZ region is a single availability zone comprising one or more data centers in the same geographic area. It uses redundancy on the infrastructure side (power, network, and cooling). However, this configuration remains vulnerable to failures affecting the entire data center.
Services and data are protected against localized incidents thanks to effective internal redundancy, but a major or total data center breakdown could compromise service availability. Note that each OVHcloud data center has redundant power and network supply to avoid those breakdowns.
In a 1-AZ region, your instances or other resources can be distributed across several data centers within the same availability zone. This architecture allows you to benefit from local redundancy while remaining in the same availability zone.
Characteristics
- Erasure Coding: Implements mechanisms such as replication or erasure coding (depending on the service) to ensure continuity in case of hardware failures. Data is distributed across multiple servers and storage units within the availability zone to mitigate the impact of localized issues.
- Cost-Effectiveness: This deployment model is cost-efficient, ideal for general-purpose workloads, development environments, and backups. It prioritizes affordability over enhanced fault tolerance.
- Operational simplicity: A single zone of availability facilitates management while offering minimal tolerance to internal failures.
Limitations
Risk of outage: Dependence on a single availability zone can affect critical services if the data center suffers a complete outage.
No regional redundancy: There is no data or service replication across different availability zones in the region.
To improve resilience for critical applications in a 1-AZ Region, consider using asynchronous replication for added protection. This can help reinforce both application and data resiliency.
Redundancy Specifications for 1-AZ
| Specification | Description |
|---|---|
| Redundancy Type | Redundancy on the infrastructure side (power, network, and cooling). Local data replication within the zone for resilience. |
| Fault Tolerance | Protects against disk and server failures, but not against total data center failure. |
| Data protection | Data replicated within the AZ to guarantee local resilience. |
| Limits | No inter-regional or inter-zone protection; dependent on a single AZ. |
Scaling
In a 1-AZ Region, scaling options are somewhat limited due to the single availability zone. Here's how scaling works in this setup:
- Vertical scaling: Increasing the capacity of existing resources (CPU, memory) is a common solution, but it does not guarantee increased fault tolerance.
- Horizontal scaling: Although this is possible within the AZ, it does not provide redundancy between several availability zones.
- Geographical constraint: All resources remain confined to the same availability zone.
Architecture example
Scenario:
An organization utilizes the 1-AZ Region mode for its internal management application and backup services. This setup is ideal for applications that do not require high availability 24/7, but still need redundancy to protect against hardware failures.
Architecture:
- Single Availability Zone (AZ): Made up of several interconnected data centers, it guarantees resilience in the face of localized breakdowns, while at the same time providing a model suited to moderate application requirements.
- Internal replication: Data is replicated internally to protect against disk or server failures within the zone.
- Backup integration: The application uses object storage for regular backups, ensuring that data can be restored if necessary.
- Compute Instances: Basic application tasks are handled by compute instances in the same AZ, with auto-scaling for resource management.
Local Zones
Infrastructure and design
Local Zones bring OVHcloud services closer to some end users, reducing latency and enabling data to be processed locally. They are designed to offer optimal performance for applications requiring low latency and proximity to users, while meeting local compliance requirements.
Each Local Zone operates as a single availability zone with a limited set of services, making it ideal for scenarios where latency is a priority, but redundancy is not essential.
Characteristics
- Reduced latency: Local Zones ensure fast response times to users close to them, ideal for real-time applications such as online gaming or video conferencing.
- Local compliance: Data can be processed and stored in specific locations, making it easier to comply with location and regulatory requirements.
- Regional extension: Local Zones can be used as an extension of the 1-AZ regions to complete critical workloads locally, while benefiting from additional services available in the regions.
Limits
- No inter-zone redundancy: Local Zones do not offer redundancy between several zones, which limits service continuity in the event of a failure.
- Single zone limitation: Local Zones operate within a single availability zone, making them vulnerable to local failures.
- Limited set of services: Local Zones only offer a limited set of Public Cloud services (essentially Compute and Storage).
Redundancy Specifications for Local Zones
| Advantage | Description |
|---|---|
| Type of redundancy | Redundancy on the infrastructure side (power, network, and cooling). Local data replication within the zone for resilience. |
| Fault tolerance | Guarantees continuity of operations in the event of a disk or server failure within the zone, but does not protect against a total failure of the availability zone. |
| Data protection | Data replicated in the zone to guarantee local availability. |
| Limits | No protection against global or regional failures, dependent on a single Local Zone. |
Scaling
In Local Zones, scaling is designed to meet the demands of low-latency applications while being restricted to a single availability zone. Here’s how scaling is structured:
- Horizontal and vertical scalability options: Local Zones support instance scaling, but are limited by local capacity and the lack of additional zones for load balancing.
- Ultra-low latency: Scaling is focused on keeping latency to a minimum, ideal for real-time workloads.
- Planning required: Because it is limited to a single zone, careful planning is essential to avoid saturating available resources and guarantee stable performance.
Architecture example
Scenario:
A real-time online gaming platform or a video streaming service that requires ultra-low latency and high performance for users within a specific geographic region.
Architecture:
- Local Zones: located near the user base, significantly reducing latency and improving overall performance.
- Internal replication: Critical data is replicated locally within the zone to ensure resilience in the event of hardware failure.
- Localized processing: Application and processing servers are deployed in Local Zones to deliver optimal performance.
- Regulated Data: Stored within the Local Zones for compliance with data localization laws, reducing bandwidth costs.
- Load balancers: Traffic redirected to other Local Zones (if available) or regions to ensure minimum service continuity in the event of a local failure.
Comprehensive Comparison Table
| Characteristics | 1-AZ Region | Local Zones |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment Structure | Single availability zone | Single availability zone |
| Service available | All or most Public Cloud services | Most Compute and storage services |
| Redundancy | Redundancy on the infrastructure and local data replication | Redundancy on the infrastructure and local data replication |
| Data Availability | Limited during data center outages, protected against server/disk failures | Limited during data center outages, protected against server/disk failures |
| Latency | Low for close end-users | Low for close end-users |
| Ideal Use Cases | Development, staging environments, cost-sensitive applications, non-critical services | Real-time applications, edge computing, gaming, video streaming, regulatory-compliant services |
| Cost | Lower | Dependent on the specific Local Zones |
Go further
For more information and tutorials, please see our other Public Cloud support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.
If you need training or technical assistance to implement our solutions, contact your sales representative or click on this link to get a quote and ask our Professional Services experts for a custom analysis of your project.