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CockroachDB provides built-in high availability (HA) features and disaster recovery (DR) tooling to achieve operational resiliency in various deployment and use cases.
  • HA features ensure continuous access to data without interruption even in the presence of or disruptions to maximize uptime.
  • DR tools allow for recovery from major incidents to minimize downtime and data loss. Diagram showing how HA features and DR tools create a resilient CockroachDB deployment.
You can balance required SLAs and recovery objectives with the cost and management of each of these features to build a resilient deployment.
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data loss (measured by time) that an organization can tolerate.
  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum length of time it should take to restore normal operations following an outage.
For a practical guide on how CockroachDB uses Raft to replicate, distribute, and rebalance data, refer to the .

High availability

  • : CockroachDB’s built-in stores data safely and consistently on multiple nodes to ensure no downtime even during a temporary node outage. allow you to configure the number and location of to suit a deployment.
    • For more detail on planning for single-region or multi-region recovery, refer to or .
  • : Capabilities built in to CockroachDB to perform routine maintenance operations with minimal impact to foreground performance. For example, , , and .
  • (Preview): A cross-cluster replication tool between active CockroachDB clusters, which supports a range of topologies. LDR provides eventually consistent, table-level replication between the clusters. Individually, each active cluster uses CockroachDB multi-active availability to achieve low, single-region write latency with transactionally consistent writes using Raft replication.

Choose an HA strategy

Single-region replication (synchronous)Multi-region replication (synchronous)Logical data replication (asynchronous)
RPO0 seconds0 secondsImmediate mode 0.5 seconds
RTOZero RTO Potential increased latency for 1-9 secondsZero RTO Potential increased latency for 1-9 secondsZero RTO Application traffic failover time
Write latencyRegion-local write latency p50 latency < 5ms (for multiple availability zones in us-east1)Cross-region write latency p50 latency > 50ms (for a multi-region cluster in us-east1, us-east-2, us-west-1)Region-local latency depending on design p50 latency < 5ms (for multiple availability zones in us-east1)
RecoveryAutomaticAutomaticSemi-automatic
Fault toleranceZero RPO node, availability zone failures within a clusterZero RPO node, availability zone failures, region failures within a clusterZero RPO node, availability zone within a cluster, region failures with loss up to RPO in a two-region (or two datacenter) setup
Minimum regions to achieve fault tolerance132
For details on designing your cluster topology for HA with replication, refer to the page.

Disaster recovery

  • : Point-in-time backup and restore allows you to roll back to a specific point in time. Multiple supported providers means that you can store backups in your chosen provider. allow you to configure backup frequency for lower .
  • : A cross-cluster replication tool between an active primary CockroachDB cluster and a passive standby CockroachDB cluster. PCR provides transactionally consistent full-cluster replication.

Choose a DR strategy

CockroachDB is designed to recover automatically; however, building backups or PCR into your DR plan protects against unforeseen incidents.
Point-in-time backup & restorePhysical cluster replication (asynchronous)
RPO>=5 minutes10s of seconds
RTOMinutes to hours, depending on data size and number of nodesSeconds to minutes, depending on cluster size, and time of failover
Write latencyNo impactNo impact
RecoveryManual restoreManual failover
Fault toleranceNot applicableZero RPO node, availability zone within a cluster, region failures with loss up to RPO in a two-region (or two-datacenter) setup
Minimum regions to achieve fault tolerance12

See also