Data Residency - Quick Terminology Feedback

[RJ Gazarek]

Hi Everyone!

As we work to roll out Data Residency for Standard and Premium, we're taking a second look at two terms that we've been using:

- Regions: most closely related to an AWS Region

- Realms: A geographical boundary that may consist of one or more regions

We've discovered using these two has lead to some confusion, we've had to define them, and we haven't been entirely consistent with our usage of them either.  We've proposed a few ideas internally, and wanted to get your feedback on one that we've landed on.

- Location:  The geographical boundary you choose for Data Residency (dropdown)

- AWS Region: The actual AWS regions that support your chosen location

So for example, you might choose the location of EU, which would be supported by the AWS Regions: Frankfurt, Germany & Dublin, Ireland.  If we offer Data Residency in Germany alone, you may choose the location "Germany" which would be supported by the AWS Region, Germany. 

This would be reflected in our UI and documentation. And would look like the following example in the Admin section for Data Residency.

  

The goal for this is to be far more intuitive and transparent, but also get around some of the odd things where you may have 1 country with multiple regions (Like the US, which has US-East & US-West), you may have a continent with multiple countries, each with their own region, or you may have a single country with a single region in it now, that may have multiple regions in the future (such as Australia, with Sydney now and Melbourne eventually). 

Additionally, the word "location" feels relatively intuitive, and by stating the AWS Region, you know exactly what that means from an AWS architecture standpoint. 

Thanks for any feedback! 

[Jacques]

The suggestion sounds good, as long as there is an obvious link to documentation that explains which AWS Regions exist. Especially as we're talking about a SAAS offering where the goal is to have admins worry less about infrastructure. The terminology "AWS Region" refers to Amazon infrastructure and location.

[RJ Gazarek]

Yeah that was one direction I was aiming for - was just to be pretty straight forward that, we are built on AWS - and if you want to read more about what the AWS Region of Frankfurt means, it's much easier to point you to AWS resources on that.  Rather than trying to obscure it behind a layer of just saying "Frankfurt" is our "Region".

I may have to revisit this option, if there is consensus that saying "AWS" would provide confusion for people. 

[Dave Liao]

@RJ Gazarek - I like the new terms, makes sense to me. 👍

[RJ Gazarek]

thanks for the feedback! We're still exploring if this is the right direction, so I'll provide updates as we go :D 

[David Rodman]

This is very helpful for the clarity of the upcoming changes. As we are subject to ITAR, this is critical to our business. Is there an updated projected time line for the new data residency in Standard? We have an on premise Confluence site that we would like to migrate to the cloud and are going to begin a Jira implementation as well.

[RJ Gazarek]

We don't have that quite locked in yet, I know we're hoping for early next quarter to start allowing customers to spin up new instances on cloud for standard/premium and get data residency.  For existing customers that already have data in cloud, it'll be probably another quarter later, as we have to finish some backend work on moving that much data around in a more automated fashion.