Is Cloud Firestore data replicated over continents?

Question

I was reading this blog post. It make me wonder how data replication and fail overs handled in case of regional and multi-regional database projects. Article mentions that t

Answer 1

Cloud Firestore data can be stored using a multi-region location or a regional location. Using "multi-region locations" simply means storing data at multiple regions, located on the same continent. EU and US are the two only choices. This means you cannot have data close to all users, globally.

Answer 2

When you create a Firestore database in a project, you get to choose whether to:

1. Store the data in a single regional location.

   In this case the data is stored in multiple data centers in a single geographical region. For example: us-east4, which are data centers in Northern Virginia.

2. Store the data in multi-region locations.

   In this case the data is stored in multiple data centers across multiple geographical regions. For example: nam5/us-central, which are data centers across the entire US.

For more on this, see the documentation on location types.

You will have to pick one of these options when you create the database. So you can't select a mix of of multi-region and single region locations.

All users of your app access the same data. When data is written, it is automatically replicated across all data centers in the region(s).