Overview
Solution overview
Zone-disaster recovery refers to application services deployed across multiple data centers within a single region. When one data center fails, Global Traffic Manager (GTM) ensures 24/7 stable business operations. Even if a single data center fails, it does not affect business continuity, ensuring uninterrupted user access.
This topic explains the deployment method of zone-disaster recovery using the active-active architecture within the same city. The active-active disaster recovery architecture in the same city involves establishing two data centers in the same city that can independently support critical systems operation. Both centers have essentially equivalent business processing capabilities and synchronize data in real time through high-speed links. Under normal circumstances, they share the operation of business and management systems and can switch operations. In disaster scenarios, they can perform emergency disaster recovery switching without basic data loss, maintaining continuous business operations. Most enterprises prioritize the active-active deployment approach within the same city to balance cost and high availability concerns.
Target audience
Enterprise network department and business operations department personnel.
Scenarios
Applicable to disaster recovery scenarios where application services are deployed across multiple data centers within a single region.
Terms
Term | Introduction |
GTM | Global Traffic Manager (GTM) supports intelligent resolution, health checks, fault isolation, and failover, helping enterprises quickly build disaster recovery architectures such as dual data centers in the same city or three data centers across two regions. |
Intelligent resolution | Refers to resolving the nearest application server IP address based on the user request source address (ISP, region, etc.) to achieve proximity service. |
Health check | Provides layer 3-7 checks for servers to promptly detect abnormal applications. |
Primary and secondary IPAM pools | Supports primary and secondary IPAM pools, configuring service endpoints for different data centers to achieve data center-level fault isolation and failover. |
Architecture
Architecture diagram
Benefits
Building a zone-disaster recovery architecture with Global Traffic Manager (GTM) offers advantages such as low investment cost, fast construction speed, relatively simple operations management, and higher reliability.
With active-active deployment in the same city, if one data center fails, the business can quickly switch to another operational data center through Global Traffic Manager (GTM), ensuring that enterprises can effectively respond to single data center failures.
With dual business centers both online, GTM flexibly schedules traffic to each center, supporting A/B releases and grayscale releases.
Implementation
Preparations
Create a GTM instance, Global Traffic Manager.
NoteThe Ultimate Edition detects failures and switches in less time, approximately 1 minute. The Standard Edition takes about 3 minutes. Users with high availability requirements are recommended to choose the Ultimate Edition.
Prepare resources: China (Beijing) Zone A 192.0.2.0, China (Beijing) Zone B 192.0.2.1
Operation guide
Go to Alibaba Cloud DNS-Global Traffic Manager, find the target instance in the Global Traffic Manager instance list, and click Configure in the Actions column.
On the Basic Configuration tab, click Modify and configure according to the prompts and your requirements. It is recommended to set Global TTL to 10 minutes.
On the Address Pool Configuration tab, click Add Address Pool and configure according to the prompts. First, create two address pools: "Business Center 01" address pool with IP address "192.0.2.0" and "Business Center 02" address pool with IP address "192.0.2.1". Finally, click the "+" in the address pool list to Add health check and customize health check parameters according to the prompts and business requirements.
On the Basic Configuration tab, select Geographic Location-based Access Policy type, click Configure, and then click the Add Access Policy button. Create one global access policy, select Global for Resolution Request Traffic, select "Business Center 01" and "Business Center 02" address pools for Primary Address Pool Collection, and select Return All Addresses for Load Balancing Policy. This setting enables both data centers to provide services simultaneously and automatically removes faulty addresses when failures occur.
Online traffic access
Go to Alibaba Cloud DNS - Hosted Public Zone, and click Settings for the target domain name.
Click the Add Record button to add a CNAME record, with the record value being the GTM CNAME access domain. After completing the resolution record addition, the application service is officially connected to Global Traffic Manager.
FAQ
How long does failover take? With health check interval set to 15 seconds, TTL to 10 seconds, and consecutive failure count to 3, GTM can accurately detect failures and switch in about 1 minute. After failover, theoretically, it can take effect across the network in about 10 seconds, but the actual situation depends on the cache settings of ISPs across the country.
Can I use Global Traffic Manager service if DNS is not using Cloud DNS? Yes, Global Traffic Manager provides a CNAME scheduling domain. You can create a CNAME record on your DNS domain management platform.