Regions

A region is an independent geographical location made up of one or more data centers. All STACKIT regions are exclusively located in Germany (EU01) and Austria (EU02). This local presence ensures that all data processing complies with strict European data protection laws, such as the GDPR.

Each region is physically separate from other regions. This means that if one region fails, it won’t affect another.

Availability zones

An availability zone (AZ) consists of one or more data centers within a region. Each region has at least three physically separate availability zones.

This separation is crucial: each availability zone has its own independent power supply, cooling system, and network infrastructure. This can be implemented in a few ways:

A single data center that meets the separation requirements.
A logical unit that spans multiple data centers.
Several fire sections within a single data center.

Although availability zones are isolated, they are close enough to each other to provide very low latency (about 0.5 ms).

Availability and resilience

STACKIT gives you a few options to manage your applications’ availability.

Metro availability zone

The Metro AZ is a special feature that automatically distributes VMs and data across two or more availability zones within a region. This provides maximum high availability, even if your application doesn’t have built-in high-availability mechanisms.

If an AZ fails, the affected VMs automatically restart in another AZ. This is especially helpful if you don’t want to build complex distributed architectures yourself. The name for this zone is <region>-m, for example, eu01-m.

Single availability zone

The Single AZ option ties VMs to a single selected AZ. If that specific zone fails, the VMs won’t automatically restart in another AZ.

This option is perfect for applications that already have their own resilience mechanisms, such as distributed databases (Galera, MongoDB). You can distribute your application across multiple Single-availability zones to have complete control over component placement and maximize overall availability.

Compliance and security

By having data centers exclusively in Germany and Austria, STACKIT ensures digital sovereignty. All services and data are subject only to EU law and the strict requirements of the GDPR.

STACKIT is certified according to internationally recognized standards, including ISO 27001 (Information Security) and C5 Type 2 (Cybersecurity for Cloud Services), which highlights its high level of data security.