We are pleased to announce that Multi-region Replication (previously known as Multi-region Namespaces or MRN) is now Generally Available (GA) in Temporal Cloud. We are also launching a new capability, Same-region Replication, in Public Preview.
These advancements further enhance Temporal Cloud’s High Availability (HA) offerings, providing robust solutions for maintaining operational continuity and meeting stringent availability requirements.
High Availability in Temporal Cloud
Temporal Cloud is designed with reliability and availability built into its foundations. Temporal Cloud provides a contractual service level agreement (SLA) of 99.9% guarantee against service errors for all Namespaces, which meets the needs of many use cases.
In addition, for critical use cases, Temporal Cloud offers a suite of High Availability (HA) features that organizations can enable for 99.99% SLA. Temporal Cloud’s HA features ensure that your Workflows remain operational even during unexpected disruptions. When HA features are enabled, Temporal Cloud automatically synchronizes data between a primary and a replica, keeping them in sync. In the event of an incident or outage, the system seamlessly fails over to the replica, allowing Workflows to continue without interruption.
Why High Availability Matters
Temporal Cloud’s HA features are designed to meet the needs of use cases where uptime is critical. Key benefits include:
- Business Continuity: Protect applications from outages and service disruptions with seamless failover mechanisms for your Workflows.
- Compliance and Reliability: Achieve a 99.99% contractual service level Agreement (SLA) for applications with strict availability requirements.
- Flexible Deployment Options: Choose between single-region replication and multi-region replication based on your application architecture and business needs.
Key Concepts
Replication is the foundation of Temporal Cloud’s HA features, designed as an additional safeguard for your workflows against service disruptions.
A standard namespace in Temporal uses database-level replication to distribute data across three availability zones (AZs). This ensures that any change in workflow state and generated history is first written to all three AZs. As a result, your Temporal namespace remains operational even if a single AZ goes down.
However, Temporal deploys namespaces using a cell-based architecture, where each cell—along with its physical and software resources—acts as a failure domain. If a shared dependency or common infrastructure component, such as the DB, or networking, fails within a cell, all namespaces within that cell can be affected. Temporal Cloud’s HA features protect against this failure mode by creating a Replica and initiating Failovers as necessary.
- Replica: Workflow Executions are asynchronously replicated from an active Namespace to a replica. This can occur within the same region or across different regions, depending on your architecture and requirements.
- Failover: In cases of network or performance issues in the active Namespace, Temporal Cloud automatically transitions control to the replica, ensuring continuity without manual intervention.
Multi-region Replication: General Availability
With Multi-region Replication now Generally Available (GA), users can replicate Workflows across different regions for enhanced resilience and reliability. This capability is particularly beneficial for organizations with multi-regional architectures or those required to be highly available across regions for compliance purposes. You can also now enable Multi-region replication for your GCP Namespaces!
Future Pricing Update: To align with cloud provider network traffic pricing, we plan to introduce adjustments for multi-region replication in the future. Your plan will include a generous base allocation, with additional pay-per-use charges for any network usage beyond that threshold. Most multi-region customers will not be impacted by this change.
Same-region Replication: Public Preview
For applications designed for single-region deployment, Same-region Replication is now available in Public Preview. This feature enables Workflows to be replicated within the same region, providing a reliable failover mechanism while maintaining simplicity in deployment.
Next Steps
To enable High Availability features, you can configure your Namespace settings directly within Temporal Cloud. For detailed instructions, please refer to our updated documentation, which reflects these new capabilities. Note that enabling Same-region or Multi-region Replication incurs additional charges, see Pricing for more details.
Coming Soon!
The GA of Multi-region Replication and the launch of Same-region Replication mark an important milestone in our commitment to providing reliable, scalable solutions for business-critical workflows. These features empower organizations to maintain operational continuity and meet their availability goals with confidence.
Be on the lookout for the next feature in our High Availability portfolio coming soon — Multi-cloud Replication, i.e. the ability to replicate workflows across cloud providers!