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ScyllaDB Docs ScyllaDB Cloud Deployment Configure Availability Zones

Configure Availability Zones¶

This section describes how to configure Availability Zones (AZs) for your cluster and explains the impact of different configurations on availability, performance, and cost.

The Availability Zones setting lets you select the specific zone ID for each cluster zone. This is useful when you want to align your cluster placement with your application infrastructure.

This is particularly important on Amazon Web Services (AWS), where availability zone names (for example, us-east-1a) may map to different underlying AZ IDs across accounts. If the AZ IDs do not match, traffic between your application and cluster may be routed across availability zones, increasing latency and generating additional cross-AZ data transfer costs.

Multi-AZ Deployment (Default)¶

By default, each cluster zone is deployed in a different cloud availability zone to provide high availability.

For production workloads, it is recommended to:

  • Use three availability zones

  • Configure a replication factor of 3

  • Place one cluster zone in each AZ

This configuration ensures:

  • Each AZ contains a single replica

  • The cluster can tolerate a full AZ failure

  • Quorum is maintained (for example, with LOCAL_QUORUM)

Single-AZ Deployment¶

For development, testing, or cost-sensitive environments, you can deploy multiple cluster zones within a single availability zone.

This configuration helps reduce cross-AZ traffic costs and lowers overall infrastructure expenses. Its downside is that it provides less fault tolerance compared to multi-AZ deployments.

Nodes are placed in separate spread placement groups within the availability zone to reduce the impact of individual cloud server failures. However, failures affecting the entire availability zone may impact all nodes simultaneously.

Caution

Deploying multiple nodes within the same cloud availability zone can lower infrastructure costs, but increases the risk of a full cluster outage. A disruption affecting that cloud availability zone may impact all nodes simultaneously, making the cluster unavailable.

How to Configure Availability Zones¶

You can configure availability zones when creating a cluster:

  1. Go to the cluster creation page.

  2. Locate the Availability Zones section.

  3. For each cluster zone, select an availability zone from the dropdown menu.

../_images/availability-zones.png

Make sure your selection aligns with:

  • Your application’s availability zones

  • High availability requirements

  • Cost considerations

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  • Configure Availability Zones
    • Multi-AZ Deployment (Default)
    • Single-AZ Deployment
    • How to Configure Availability Zones
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Last updated on 09 Apr 2026.
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