Every engineering leader eventually asks the same question: What happens if my cloud region goes down? This isn't unheard of, or even rare, and the stakes are obvious. A single-region deployment might work fine on day one, but it leaves you exposed: one outage, one fiber cut, or one bad update from your provider, and your application is offline. In some cases, your entire business could be at risk.

That's why recently, multi-region architecture has become the gold standard. When done right, it hedges against a whole range of issues:

• Resilience against outages: if one region fails, another keeps your services running.
• Better performance for global users: serve workloads closer to where customers actually are.
• Compliance and residency: keep data where regulations require it to live.
• Disaster recovery: achieve tighter RPO/RTO targets by having infrastructure already live in a second region.
• Reduced blast radius: isolate failures and upgrades so they don't take down your entire platform.

It's no surprise that every forward-looking team wants to go multi-region. The real challenge is getting there.

Multi-Region with Kubernetes

Kubernetes tends to be the first thing engineering teams reach for these days when facing a DevOps challenge. It makes sense - Kubernetes is popular, and looks good on a resume. It can be configured to manage a single region relatively easily. But running and maintaining a multi-region Kubernetes deployment is a lot more complicated than it may appear on the surface.

Kubernetes clusters don't stretch across multiple regions (and forcing it can lead to far more headaches than it's worth). The 'right' way to do multi-region Kubernetes is to do a new cluster for every single region you'd like to be in, and manage them all separately. In theory, that seems reasonable, but the cracks start to show almost immediately.

Networking Headaches

Networking is almost always the first wall you hit. Kubernetes assumes flat, low-latency networking inside a single cluster. Spread that across regions, and suddenly:

• Latency spikes when pods in one region talk to pods in another.
• Traffic routing becomes a patchwork of global DNS, Anycast, or mesh gateways that are brittle under failure.
• Load balancers differ by region and provider — AWS ALB ≠ GCP GLB ≠ Azure Front Door. None are portable.
• East-west traffic leakage can silently rack up egress fees while degrading performance.

The 'invisible plumbing' turns into a mess of VPNs, peering links, and overlapping CIDRs. These issues are extremely difficult to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Multi-Cluster Overhead

Kubernetes itself isn't designed to span regions. As mentioned before, one single cluster doesn't span across regions. You'll need to introduce multiple clusters, which means:

• Version drift across clusters.
• Duplicated observability, GitOps, and security tooling.
• Increased blast radius of upgrades and changes.

Now you don't just have a multi-region Kubernetes deployment, you have N deployments for every region you want to deploy to, and multiplied management costs to go along with it. That ends up being cost and time-prohibitive for all but the most well-funded teams.

Operational Complexity

Multi-region Kubernetes isn't just a technology problem; it's an organizational one. Teams must develop expertise in:

• Federating service discovery across clusters.
• Designing global traffic routing policies.
• Coordinating deployments across regions.
• Managing cost and compliance when workloads span geographies.

The end result is that most teams spend more time operating Kubernetes itself than delivering business value.

How We Solved the Problem

When we set out to build Cycle.io , our goal was simple: build a platform where someone could run anything, anywhere. Of course, actually building such a platform was far more complicated than we even imagined.

Instead of trying to make Kubernetes bend to our goals, we decided to build Cycle on top of Linux primitives, from the ground up. That includes our own container orchestration technology, our own control plane, networking stack, and more. While it took us longer and seemed strange at the time, it afforded us the ability to build the platform as we envisioned it, without limiting ourselves to things available via open source.

Today, Cycle orchestrates containers and VMs across regions, multiple cloud providers, and even on-prem simultaneously. We created a unified, flat Layer 3 network that spans across regional and provider boundaries, automatically handles service discovery, global load balancing, and a lot more, while managing to provide automated updates regularly without any effort on the customer's part.

Multi-region is native to Cycle and works out of the box with any providers that support it. All the complexities associated with doing it with Kubernetes are eliminated by the nature of the platform. The result is the resilience, performance, and flexibility that multi-region was supposed to deliver, without the operational tax.

The Bottom Line

Multi-region is no longer optional for serious applications. The benefits are too important to ignore. But the Kubernetes path is paved with complexity: networking headaches, multi-cluster overhead, and operational challenges.

Cycle removes those barriers. By eliminating the need for Kubernetes itself and replacing it with a unified, global network fabric, we make multi-region and multi-cloud attainable for businesses of any size and scale.

If you're tired of fighting Kubernetes to reach multi-region, it's time to see what infrastructure looks like when multi-region is the default, and not the afterthought.