6 deployment archetypes for your reliability, cost, operational, and latency needs

As a cloud architect or IT decision maker planning to deploy an application in Google Cloud, your first step is to choose a deployment archetype that helps you meet your availability, latency, performance, and cost requirements. So, what’s a deployment archetype? It’s an architectural model that you use as the foundation on which to build cloud topologies that meet the business and technical requirements of your application. 

As we discuss in the recently published Google Cloud deployment archetypes guide, Google Cloud supports six deployment archetypes: zonal, regional, multi-regional, global, hybrid, and multicloud.

• Zonal: Your application runs in a single Google Cloud zone.

• Regional: Instances of your application run independently in two or more zones within a single Google Cloud region.

• Multi-regional: Your application runs independently in multiple zones across two or more Google Cloud regions.

• Global: Your application runs across Google Cloud regions worldwide, either as a globally distributed (location-unaware) stack or as regionally isolated stacks. 

• Hybrid: Certain parts of your application are deployed in Google Cloud, while other parts run on-premises.

• Multicloud: Some parts of your application are deployed in Google Cloud, and other parts are deployed in other cloud platforms.

The following diagram shows six applications running in Google Cloud. Each application in this example uses a separate deployment archetype that meets the specific requirements of the application.

The Google Cloud deployment archetypes guide explores these six deployment archetypes in depth, and presents use cases and design considerations for each deployment archetype.

It also presents detailed guidance about when to use them. When you choose a deployment archetype for your cloud application, you need to consider the tradeoffs between sometimes conflicting design goals like availability, cost, and operational complexity. To help you navigate the available choices, the Google Cloud deployment archetypes guide provides a comparative analysis of the archetypes. For example, if an application should serve users in multiple countries and needs high availability, then you might need the multi-regional deployment archetype. But for an internal application that's used by a group of employees within a single geographical region, you might prioritize cost over availability and, therefore, choose the regional deployment archetype.

Then, once you’ve selected a deployment archetype for your application, you need to build your cloud architecture by using Google Cloud services. To help you with that, we provide the following reference architectures and design guides:

• Single-zone deployment on Compute Engine: Reference architecture for a multi-tier application that runs on Compute Engine VMs in a single zone in Google Cloud.

• Regional deployment on Compute Engine: Reference architecture for a multi-tier application that runs on Compute Engine VMs in multiple zones within a Google Cloud region.

• Multi-regional deployment on Compute Engine: Reference architecture for a multi-tier application that runs on Compute Engine VMs in multiple regions in Google Cloud.

• Global deployment with Compute Engine and Spanner: Reference architecture for a multi-tier application that runs on Compute Engine VMs and Spanner in a global topology in Google Cloud.

• ​​Build hybrid and multicloud architectures using Google Cloud: Guidance to help you plan and architect hybrid and multicloud environments using Google Cloud.

Deciding the deployment archetype that’s best suited for a cloud application is an important step in your cloud architecture journey. This decision influences (and can help to simplify) subsequent design decisions regarding the Google Cloud products and features that you can or should use. The information in the Google Cloud deployment archetypes guide is there to help.