Why Cloud Data Replication Matters

Modern applications require data, and that data usually needs to be globally available, easily accessible and served with reliable performance expectations. Today, much of the heavy lifting happens behind the scenes. Let’s look at why the cloud factors into the importance of data replication for business applications.

What is data replication? Simply put, it is a set of processes to keep additional copies of data available for emergencies, backups or to meet performance requirements. Copies may be done in duplicate, triplicate or more depending on the potential risk of a failure or the geographic spread of an application’s user base.

These multiple pieces of data may be chopped up into smaller pieces and spread around a server, network, data center or continent. This ensures data is always available and performance is unfailing in a scalable way.

There are many reasons for building applications that understand replication, with or without cloud support. These are basic topics that any developer has had to deal with, but they are even more important when applications go global and/or mobile. Then they need ways to keep data secure and located efficiently.

These particular areas are commonly discussed when talking about cloud data replication:

This refers to making sure all data is ready for use when requested, with the latest versions and updates. Availability is affected when concurrent sessions do not share or replicate their data effectively. By replicating the latest changes to other nodes or servers, it should be instantly available to users who are accessing those other nodes.

Keeping a master copy is important, but it is equally important to keep that copy up to date as much as possible for all users. This means also keeping child nodes up to date with the master node so everyone stays up to date.

Data replication helps reduce latency of applications by keeping copies of data close to the end user of the application. Modern cloud applications are built on top of different networks often located in geographic regions where their user base is most active. While the overhead of keeping copies synchronized and copied might seem extreme, the positive impact on the end-user experience cannot be overstated — they expect their data to be close by and ready for use. If local servers have to go around the globe to fetch their data, the outcome is high latency and poor user experience.

Replication is especially important for backup and disaster management purposes, such as when a node goes down. Replicas that were synchronized can then help recover data on new nodes that may be added due to a recent failure. When a data infrastructure requires too much manual copying of data during a failure, there are bound to be issues.

Failover of broken resources can be automated more fully when there are multiple replicas available, especially in different geographic regions that may not be affected by a regional disaster. Applications that can leverage data replication can also take care to preserve user data; otherwise, they risk losing information when a device breaks or a data center is destroyed.

Some see data replication as something “nice to have,” but as you can see, it’s not only about backup and disaster management; it’s also about application performance. There are other benefits as well that you can find as part of enterprise disaster management and performance plans.

The backend systems of a data replication system help keep copies of data spread around and redundant. This requires multiple nodes in the form of clusters that can communicate internally to keep data aligned.