Survive Region Outages with CockroachDB: Because Sh*T Happens

CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, has made significant changes to simplify multi-region configuration. Users can now think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways: the regions in which the database should reside, the survivability goal of the database, and the latency requirements for each table. The new abstractions allow users to specify a survival goal for the database, in terms they'd understand, and dramatically simplify the configuration of tables to achieve latency goals. This includes automatic creation of zone configurations with at least 3 replicas spread out amongst the available regions defined in the database, and the ability to upgrade to REGION survivability which creates five replicas for greater fault tolerance. Additionally, users can specify low-latency access by table using three new locality configurations: REGIONAL BY TABLE, REGIONAL BY ROW, and GLOBAL.