Data residency is about *where* your bits physically live. It's the legal requirement that certain data must be stored and processed within a specific country or region.
Your ops team cares because it's a hard infrastructure constraint. If you screw it up, it's not just a policy violation—it's a legal breach that can mean fines, lost contracts, and operational shutdowns in that region.
Key technical implications:
* **Storage & Backups**: Your primary storage, caches, and backup destinations must be geo-fenced.
* **Compute**: VMs, containers, and serverless functions processing regulated data must pin to allowed zones.
* **Networking**: You must control and verify traffic paths to prevent egress across borders.
* **Observability**: Your logs and metrics for that data might also need to stay resident.
Example: A Kubernetes setup for EU-only data.
```yaml
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
name: eu-resident
provisioner: ebs.csi.aws.com
parameters:
type: gp3
fsType: ext4
allowedTopologies:
- matchLabelExpressions:
- key: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
values:
- eu-central-1a
- eu-central-1b
---
# Then, use nodeSelector/Affinity to pin Pods to same region.
```
Ops enforces this at the resource level. It's not a "business problem" once the requirement is set—it's your problem to implement and prove.
-dk
Trust but verify, then don't trust.