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Architecture

lionbackup is designed for traceable, sovereign data storage in Europe and is built multi-tenant. The platform is divided into a central Business Zone and several mutually isolated Storage Zones.

Business Zone (BZ)​

The Business Zone runs the central services:

  • the customer portal and the management API,
  • the databases and message queues,
  • the observability (monitoring and logging).

Per environment the Business Zone exists exactly once. Important: the actual customer uploads do not run through the Business Zone.

Storage Zones (SZ)​

Storage Zones are network-isolated storage clusters — where applicable with different providers and at different locations. In each Storage Zone the Citadels receive the encrypted backups and store them in the attached, S3-compatible object storage.

The available zones and locations are described on the Regions and zones page.

Coupling of the zones​

Storage Zones and the Business Zone are coupled through encrypted, mutually authenticated connections. Only management and metadata run over these connections — such as reference data, file metadata and replication. The actual customer uploads go directly to the public endpoints of the Citadels.

                 ┌──────────────────────────────┐
                 │        Business Zone         │
                 │  Portal · API · DB · Queues   │
                 └──────┬───────────────┬────────┘
                        │  encrypted    │  encrypted
                        │  (metadata)   │  (metadata)
              ┌─────────▼──────┐  ┌─────▼──────────┐
              │  Storage Zone A│  │ Storage Zone B │
              │   Citadel(s)   │  │   Citadel(s)   │
              └─────────▲──────┘  └─────▲──────────┘
                        │ HTTPS upload  │ HTTPS upload
                   ┌────┴───────────────┴────┐
                   │     lionbackup client    │
                   └──────────────────────────┘

Failure behaviour​

Because the Storage Zones keep zone-local data, they can continue operating even if the Business Zone is temporarily unavailable. The strict separation — dedicated private subnets, separate providers/projects — is at the same time a security feature: see Zone isolation.