Zendesk Support scalability and performance: Technical architecture

<div class="article-banners">
<div id="docs-wmp-link"><a href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5411234991258-plan" rel="noopener" target="_blank">What's my plan?</a></div>
<div class="article-banner" id="suite_all">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>All Suites</strong>
</td>
<td>Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div class="article-banner" id="support_all">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Support</strong>
</td>
<td>Team, Professional, or Enterprise</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
</div>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">At Zendesk, our goal is to help bring companies and their customers closer together with
software that’s easy to use, easy to customize, and easy to scale. It starts with ensuring
Zendesk Support runs smoothly while providing you with a service that scales to meet your
ever-changing needs. </p>
<p class="p">As our customers grow and their needs change, the technology has to scale to meet the demand
for performance and reliability. Zendesk Support is built on an enterprise-level operations and
technology architecture that exceeds industry standards and future-proofs your business. The
following diagram gives an overview of the technical architecture. See the rest of the article
for explanations of the parts.</p>
<p class="p"><img class="image img-screenshot" id="topic_qtj_m3q_zm__image_cxp_glr_zm" src="https://zen-marketing-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/en/data_centers2.png" width="600"></p>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_l4v_kpq_zm">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">A redundant and distributed environment</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Zendesk Support uses a fully redundant, distributed, and automated environment consisting of
geographically separate data centers running multiple, self-sustaining instances of the
application. </p>
<p class="p">To ensure high performance for customers globally, Zendesk Support runs on multiple data centers
around the world. Each data center increases capacity and reduces
latency for customers. With the
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838409754" target="_blank">Data Center
Location</a> feature,
customers
can
select
their preferred data center location.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_shg_npq_zm">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">A pod architecture design</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Each data center consists of one or more pods. This pod architecture presents maximum flexibility
with the benefits of faster provisioning, user customization, and
improved scalability. A new Zendesk Support customer is assigned to
a specific pod in one of the data centers. Each pod has all the
resources necessary to run Zendesk Support independently of the
other pods. The resources include application servers, web servers,
and database servers, as well as resources to handle other work such
as email processing and reporting. </p>
<p class="p">Each pod contains several database clusters, each consisting of a primary database server and two
secondary database servers that continuously mirror the primary. If
the primary unexpectedly encounters a problem, one of the spares
immediately takes its place. This automated system of backup servers
significantly reduces the possibility of downtime. </p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title4" class="topic nested1" id="topic_a5n_y4b_k4b">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title4">Pod moves</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">As a standard part of network management, pod moves can happen
periodically. This can impact your IP address <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408886840986" target="_blank">allowlists</a> and
firewall configurations. You can use the Zendesk API to get the
most-recent list of public IP addresses for Zendesk products. See
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408842860186" target="_blank">Configuring your firewall for
use with Zendesk products</a> for more
information.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title5" class="topic nested1" id="topic_pcx_rpq_zm">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title5">A sharded database design</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">The building blocks of each database cluster are shards, which are smaller, logical
databases. A sharded architecture allows Zendesk Support to rebalance load across physical database
clusters and pods. Zendesk Support has hundreds of shards distributed across database clusters
worldwide. Each shard supports a certain number of customers. The number varies depending on
the data volumes generated by customers. If a customer demands more capacity, Zendesk Support can
fully dedicate a single shard or database cluster to the customer.</p>
</div>
</div>
<script id="docs-schema-markup" type="application/ld+json">{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408832509338",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408832509338-Zendesk-Support-scalability-and-performance-Technical-architecture",
"headline": "Zendesk Support scalability and performance: Technical architecture",
"description": "You can understand the technical architecture and scalability features of the support system, including its distributed data centers, pod design, and sharded databases, to ensure performance and reliability as your needs grow.",
"articleSection": "Account administration",
"datePublished": "2021-10-16T03:47:05+00:00",
"dateModified": "2025-09-05T23:14:57+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408832509338"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
}
}</script>