Hi there, and thanks so much for watching our video.
My name is Bradley Knapp and I am one of the product managers here at IBM Cloud.
And the question that I'm answering for you today is what is an MZR?
You're obviously on our site and you're seeing this mentioned a lot.
So what is it?
M.
Z.
R.
Well, MZR is an acronym, it stands for Multi-Zone Region.
And so before I can answer, "what is a multi-zone region?",
first, we need to talk about "what is a zone?",
or specific to IBM Cloud, "what is in availability zone?",
or an AZ.
So, an availability zone is a single physical location
that contains all of the infrastructure necessary to run
IBM's Cloud.
So if we think about what goes inside an AZ,
let's imagine our building here, right?
So this is a physical data center building.
Well, what do you need to run the cloud?
Obviously, you've got to have some internet that comes in, right?
So you've got fiber that's coming in from multiple providers,
multiple redundant 10 gigabit links.
And so we'll have fiber that come in
from all of the major telcos
because we need to guarantee as much uptime as possible.
Also, because you, our clients need to be able to tie in with us,
you want to come in across our private network.
And so we want to be able to support the telco of your choice as you tie in.
So we've got a building, we've got some fiber running to it.
What else do we need?
We need electricity, right?
And we don't want just a little bit of electricity.
We want a lot of electricity and we want it redundant.
And so we'll have electricity that comes into this zone
from two different directions.
We'll have one from Provider A and one from Provider B.
And then in case we have problems with that electricity,
we've also got to have generators.
Because if the power goes out,
we can't just shut the data center down,
we still have to generate electricity,
so we're going to have generators outside the building.
We have to have enough generating capacity to run everything that's inside.
And in addition to those generators,
in order to bridge the gap between when the power goes off
and the generators go on,
we have huge UPS systems.
UPS is an Uninterruptible Power Supply,
and those UPS systems are sized
to get us 15 to 20 minutes between when the power comes off
and the generators come all the way online.
Now, in practice, we don't need anywhere near that much time.
But it's just a good thing to have.
So we've got our power.
We've got our internet.
What comes next?
Well, we need the compute and the storage, right?
We've got the network, well, the outside part of it.
We need the compute and we need the storage.
So inside this data center, we have rows of servers.
And in these rows are racks,
and in each rack are up to 43 servers.
In addition to the servers that are on those rows,
we also have all of the network gear:
the switches, the routers,
the hardware firewall devices, hardware load balancers.
So all of the equipment,
what you think of is the magic that is the underlying layer of the cloud,
that is all in these rows.
And then the last piece that we have is arguably the most important,
specifically depending on region, and that's going to be -
I'm going to put that over here - that's our air conditioning.
Because what's the point of having a data center
with all of this compute, storage and network capacity in it
if you can't keep it cool?
So we've got air conditioning over here, keeping everything cool.
It's blowing cold air into the cold aisles,
we're ducting the hot air out of the hot aisles to get rid of it.
And so this is an Availability Zone.
This is one AZ.
So, to get back to our original question,
"what is an MZR?"
Well, an MZR, a Multi-Zone Region, is a single geography.
So, a single area like Dallas-Fort Worth,
or Frankfurt, or London,
where we will have three or more availability zones.
And so we're going to have Availability Zone 1,
Availability Zone 2,
and Availability Zone 3.
One, two, three.
Again, each of these is physically distinct from the others,
and we try and put some geographical separation in them.
Anywhere from, oh, 5 or so kilometers
up to about 25 kilometers distance between them.
And so, not only do you have physical distance,
but we also make sure that they are in geographically separate fault profiles.
So for an area that is active seismically,
we want to be sure that they don't share common seismic faults.
If we're in an area that has flooding risks,
we want to be sure that they're not all sitting in the same flood plain.
If we're in a politically unstable area,
we want to be sure that they each have their own security posture.
So we've got our three zones.
Now we have to interconnect them all.
Yeah, let's use a different color to interconnect.
We're going to interconnect them like this.
So we have all of this interconnection.
This guarantees that if you've got a workload
that is running in zones 1 and 3, you can keep them in sync.
But we're not done.
I talked earlier about customers that want to come in
and they want to bring their fiber to us.
They don't just want to come in over a VPN,
they want a dedicated MPLS circuit or something like that.
So in addition to our three zones,
we are also going to have 2 network points of presence
and I'm going to call these A and B.
A "Network Point of Presence" or network PoP,
or a network hotel,
is a place where a lot of fiber comes together.
Fiber from companies that lease it individually,
fiber from the telcos, fibers from the provider.
But the fiber comes in here.
These are the main connection points.
Now, in some IBM Cloud MZR locations,
we're going to co-locate our network hotel in with the data center,
and in other ones they're disparate,
but each of these locations is also going to be fully interconnected
with the data centers because again,
we have to have as much redundancy as possible.
We don't want any single problem to take out a workload.
So this is the construct, the "multi-zone region".
Now the last question is,
"why would you care about a multi-zone region?"
Why does this matter?
And so this is where we're going to get into the specifics
of running highly available cloud native workloads.
Because this is a different construct
than how you did it on-premises back in the day.
So a cloud workload that is run highly available.
Let's get our data centers back up here again.
So we've got 1, 2, and 3.
In a cloud native architecture,
you never run in just a single zone unless you have to,
and sometimes there are good reasons that you have to.
Some IBM Cloud locations only have one zone,
that's called a single zone region,
and there are lots of good reasons for that.
But we're going to focus on the multi-zone architecture.
So let's say that your workload,
your primary is going to be Zone 1, right?
So if you've got your little guy over here,
and he's surfing your website on his laptop
and typing away and all that, his actual request,
the request transmission themselves
are going to be coming in over the public internet into Zone 1.
Now it's going to get processed here,
data is going to get passed back.
What happens if something goes wrong?
That could be a power outage.
That could be some sort of a natural disaster,
a flood, a hurricane.
It could be anything that goes wrong
that could cause Data Center 1,
or Availability Zone 1, to come offline.
Well, if your architecture is correct,
you aren't using just one.
You have a load balancer involved.
You're going to use one and two,
or one and three, or one, two and three.
So instead of going directly to one,
let's say that that connection then fails
because you've got some redundancy
and it says, "Oh, this one fell offline.
Now, instead of going to 1, no more, now we're going to go to 2".
And that's going to be the location of where we're going to do the compute,
the app that's serving up the data for the app that you've written,
whatever it may be.
Likewise, if there's a problem with 2, it goes offline.
That's OK because you've already got your redundancy.
So it's going to start going to 3.
This cloud native, highly available architecture
is key to a successful cloud deployment.
If you are not running your production apps
highly available in two zones,
you are going to get yourself into trouble.
Now, if you have additional questions about how to engage
in this kind of architecture, we would love to help you out.
Please reach out to your IBM sales team.
Go check out the IBM Cloud Architecture Center.
We have lots of documentation
on how to build your workload
so that you don't have to worry about a failure in any particular zone.
You are set up for native success in a cloud native manner.
Thank you so much for your time today.
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