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Description

This article provides an introduction to the architecture around geographically dispersed Geographic Regions (also referred to as Multi-Geo") concept in CloudControl.

Content / Solution:

CloudControl supports two types of data center locations:

  1. Data centers available in the same Geographic Region - for example, US-East and US-West in the US geography. An overview of the behavior of these Multi-Location data centers is described in Introduction to Multiple Data Center Locations in the same Geographic Region
  2. Data centers available in different Geographic Regions - for example, the North America, Europe, and Australia geographic regions. This article describes the behavior of these Multi-Geo data centers.

Overview of Geographic Regions

There is a separate instance of the CloudControl software responsible for each Geographic Region which controls actions for all locations within the region. The system does reporting and usage calculation based on the local timezone of the Geographic Region (including adjustments for any local daylight savings/summer time customs). These time zones are as follows:

  • North America (NA): Eastern Time (follows local daylight savings time)
  • Canada (CA): Eastern Time (follows local daylight savings time)
  • Europe (EU): Central European Time (follows local summer time)
  • Middle-East Africa (AF): South African Standard Time
  • Australia (AU): Australia Eastern Time (follows local summer time)
  • Canberra (CANBERRA): Australia Eastern Time (follows local summer time)
  • Asia-Pacific (AP): Japan Standard Time

Functions that require interactions between different data center locations (such as How to Copy a Client Image between Locations in the Same Geographic Region) are available only between locations in the same Geographic Region. For more details, see the Additional Notes about Geographic Regions section below.

Accessing Different Geographic Regions in the Updated UI

When logging into the Updated UI, the system will default to displaying your Home Geographic Region (see below for more details).

By using the Region drop-down menu in the Updated UI, you can select the Geographic Region with which you are working:

Note that each Geographic Region also has its own Updated UI instance and URL. For best performance, you should connect to the Updated UI URL closest to wherever your browser is located from a network topology perspective. The list of available URLs is available as described in the Support and Additional URLs article.

Availability of Geographic Regions

Each organization has access to only a subset of Geographic Regions, so not all Geographic Regions may be available to your organization, and not all Cloud Providers offer the same Regions. If you do not see a Geographic Region you are looking to use, contact your Cloud Provider.

Some Cloud Providers allow you to self-provision new Geographic Regions as described in How to Enable Additional Geographic Regions.

API Interactions with Geographic Regions

Although the Updated UI seamlessly integrates different Geographic Regions into the same interface, when using the Cloud API, you must connect to a separate API endpoint for each Geographic Region. Except for a small number of functions described in the "Home" Geographic Region section below, each Region's API will only provide information about and provide management capabilities for assets in that Region. For more details, see the API documentation at API 2 - Documentation Downloads.

"Home" Geographic Region

Each organization has a "Home" Geographic Region to which the Updated UI view will default upon login. All other Geographic Regions are designated as "Shadow" Geographic Regions. The UI generally hides the distinction between Home and Shadow Geographic Regions except for the default view upon login. However, the concept is relevant to API users. A subset of API functions are available only through the "Home" Geographic Region API endpoint, specifically:

  1. User Management functions (Creating, Editing, or Deleting Sub-Administrators)
  2. Management of Tag Keys (Creating, Editing, and Deleting Tag Keys)
    1. Note the List Tag Keys function is available in all enabled Regions - it's just the management functions that are restricted to the Home Geographic Region API.

If you are unsure of your "Home" region and what Geographic Regions are enabled, you can identify it based on the List Multi-Geography Regions With Key API function.

Additional Notes about Geographic Regions

Here are a few other notes about how different Geographic Regions work:

  1. When using management functions (Create / Edit Delete) on Sub-Administrators or Tag Keys, the changes are pushed asynchronously from the Home Geographic Region to the other "Shadow" Geographic Regions. This means it may take time for a change to propagate to all regions. 
  2. The IPv6 Addresses in MCP 2.0 locations and private IPv4 addresses on Cloud Networks in MCP 1.0 locations are routable across all different data center locations, allowing you to securely communicate with your assets. For more details, see:
  3. Since each CloudControl instance operates separately in each Geographic Region, each Geographic Region has its own maintenance window. For details, see:

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