We serve customers primarily in Australia, but we are now expanding to the USA. The timeline for launch is less than 2 months. This is now a race against time to design a multi-region routing system that fits all of our needs. Here is the story.
Background
Almost all of our customers were based in Oceania. We run our Kubernetes Cluster on GCP in Australia. Go microservices, federated GraphQL, gRPC services. 2 products - Tutoring and Schools. All designed for Australia.
Then we expanded to the USA, which meant a new Kubernetes Cluster in US Central. The latency for serving US customers from Australia is an extra 200ms-300ms depending on network conditions - unacceptable. This would mean sharding the data by region, or does it? There are definitely ways to keep a unified dataset even across regions - though we did not need to do so. More on this later.
What are the requirements
