High availability and disaster recovery

IBM Watson® Natural Language Understanding is highly available within multiple IBM Cloud locations (for example, Dallas and Washington, DC). However, recovering from potential disasters that affect an entire location requires planning and preparation.

You are responsible for understanding your configuration, customization, and usage of the service. You are also responsible for being ready to re-create an instance of the service in a new location and to restore your data in any location. See How do I ensure zero downtime? External link icon for more information.

High availability

Natural Language Understanding supports high availability with no single point of failure. The service achieves high availability automatically and transparently by using the multi-zone region (MZR) feature provided by IBM Cloud.

IBM Cloud enables multiple zones that do not share a single point of failure within a single location. It also provides automatic load balancing across the zones within a region.

Disaster recovery

In the event of a catastrophic failure in a region, complete the following steps.

Create a new Natural Language Understanding service instance.
Adjust your application software to use the new service instance URL and credentials.
If you use Natural Language Understanding with Knowledge Studio custom models, you will need to redeploy your custom models to the new service instance. See Backing up and restoring data to learn how to backup and restore Knowledge Studio data.