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Is there a way to create a Persistent Disk (disk_a) in one GCP region (us-central1) and maintain a copy(disk_b) in another GCP region(asia-south1)?

Is it possible using some Distributed file system like Ceph or GlusterFS or anything else?

This is required so that in a rare case of regional failure (I understand it is barely possible), I can create a cluster or VM in the other region and mount the other disk which has the same data?

Amit Yadav
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  • What is your RPO? What is the nature of data that you store? – guillaume blaquiere Oct 14 '19 at 15:37
  • I do not really have much information of the business RPO aspect for this task. However, what would you suggest the best solution for maintaining High Availability of the disks across multiple regions? – Amit Yadav Oct 14 '19 at 17:58

1 Answers1

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In Google Cloud Platform, there are global, regional and zonal resources. Persistent disks are regional or zonal. Global (multi-region) is not offered at this time.

For the booting disk drive, you must select from regional or zonal persistent disks or local storage. Global is not an option. You can implement global file systems using your own custom services, but you cannot boot a compute engine instance from them. You can only attach additional storage from custom services.

For disaster recovery, you can create snapshots. These are global resources. How often to create snapshots depends on your RTO and RPO, the shorter these goals the more it will cost you in both money and management.

There are much better technologies to use for HA and DR than globally persistent disks that are more cost-effective and implementation efficient.

John Hanley
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  • Thank you for the detailed explanation. Only being able to add it as additional storage would be fine. In my use case, mostly we would be using the disk to mount in GKE container or attach as external storage in GCP VM instance. What do you think would be the best approach for this in order to achieve HA across multiple regions? – Amit Yadav Oct 14 '19 at 17:54
  • Disk attached to container and disk attached to a VM are exactly the same thing, thereby, you have to choose only 1 way to manage these. Snapshot is the best GCP solution, you can schedule them automatically. Their frequency depends on your RPO. I don't know 3rd party solutions, but @johnhanley should! – guillaume blaquiere Oct 14 '19 at 18:21
  • You only have regional or zonal disks from GCP. You must be more specific. However, I have answered your original question. Select this answer and create a new question. I will try to help you. However, be very specific on what you are using and what you want to accomplish. – John Hanley Oct 14 '19 at 18:22
  • Plus make sure your question clearly states "Kubernetes". – John Hanley Oct 14 '19 at 18:24