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Business Zone and Storage Zones

The zone model is the load-bearing concept of lionbackup. It separates management from storage and thereby provides isolation and resilience.

Business Zone​

The central Business Zone (BZ) houses everything you see and control as a customer, as well as the services that coordinate operations:

  • Portal and management API,
  • databases and message queues,
  • monitoring and logging.

It exists exactly once per environment. No customer content runs through the Business Zone — only its management.

Storage Zones​

A Storage Zone (SZ) is a self-contained, network-isolated storage cluster. Several Storage Zones can be operated with different providers and at different locations. Each zone:

  • receives encrypted backups through its Citadels,
  • stores the objects in an attached, S3-compatible object storage,
  • keeps zone-local data in order to keep working even without the Business Zone.

Which zones are currently available is shown under Regions and zones.

Separation and synchronization​

Storage Zones are separated from each other and from the Business Zone — with their own private subnets and separate provider projects. Management and metadata (reference data, file metadata, replication) are synchronized over encrypted, mutually authenticated connections. The actual uploads go directly to the Citadels and not through the Business Zone.

Why this separation​

  • Security. An incident in one zone stays confined to that zone.
  • Sovereignty. You choose the zone — and thus location and provider — per project.
  • Availability. Zone-local data allows continued operation during a temporary outage of the Business Zone.