Balancing Data Locality, Data Sovereignty, and Data Replication

Modern distributed systems must simultaneously respect where data must live, where it should live for performance, and where it needs to live for resilience. Data sovereignty and residency requirements increasingly affect technical design decisions, not only in regulated industries, but in any global product that must navigate regional expectations, latency constraints, cost structures, and operational realities.

At the same time, teams need durable, highly available systems that can withstand regional failures, support disaster recovery, and maintain customer trust during incidents. Balancing these concerns forces engineers to make nuanced choices about architecture, consistency, replication scope, and operational processes. In this panel, Yreix Garnier, VP of Product at Datadog, will discuss with Datadog customers the practical engineering strategies for building systems that are both locality-aware and resilient. We will explore how to design for regional autonomy, choose data placement patterns, reason about legal and logical data boundaries, manage cross-region dependencies, and operate systems safely during outages, without sacrificing observability, performance, or user experience.

Whether your systems run in a single region today or across many tomorrow, this session will equip you with real-world lessons and technical approaches for building architectures that respect locality and sovereignty while still delivering the reliability and scale modern applications demand.