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Disclaimer: The details in this post have been derived from the official documentation shared online by the Linear Engineering Team. All credit for the technical details goes to the Linear Engineering Team. The links to the original articles and sources are present in the references section at the end of the post. We’ve attempted to analyze the details and provide our input about them. If you find any inaccuracies or omissions, please leave a comment, and we will do our best to fix them.
Linear represents a new generation of project management platforms specifically designed for modern software teams.
Founded in 2019, the company has built its reputation on delivering exceptional speed and developer experience, distinguishing itself in a crowded market dominated by established players like Jira and Asana.
What sets Linear apart is its focus on performance, achieving sub-50ms interactions that make the application feel instantaneous. The platform embraces a keyboard-first design philosophy, allowing developers to navigate and manage their work without reaching for the mouse, a feature that resonates strongly with its technical user base.
The modern SaaS landscape presents a fundamental challenge that every growing platform must eventually face: how to serve a global customer base while respecting regional data requirements and maintaining optimal performance.
In this article, we look at how Linear implemented multi-region support for its customers. We will explore the architecture they built, along with the technical implementation details.
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The Need for Multi-Region Support
The decision to implement multi-region support at Linear wasn't made in a vacuum but emerged from concrete business pressures and technical foresight. There were a couple of reasons:
Compliance: The most immediate driver came from the European market, where larger enterprises expressed clear preferences for hosting their data within Europe. This was due to the need for GDPR compliance and internal data governance policies.
Technical: The primary technical concern centered on the eventual scaling limits of their PostgreSQL infrastructure. While their single-region deployment in Google Cloud's us-east-1 was serving them well, the team understood that continuing to scale vertically by simply adding more resources to a single database instance would eventually hit hard limits. By implementing multi-region support early, they created a horizontal scaling path that would allow them to distribute workspaces across multiple independent deployments, each with its own database infrastructure.
Competitive Advantage: The implementation of multi-region support also positioned Linear more favorably in the competitive project management space. By offering European data hosting, Linear could compete more effectively for enterprise contracts against established players who might not offer similar regional options.
The Architecture Design Principles
The multi-region architecture Linear implemented follows four strict requirements that shaped every technical decision in the system.
Invisible to Users: This meant maintaining single domains (linear.app and api.linear.app) regardless of data location. This constraint eliminated the simpler approach of region-specific subdomains like eu.linear.app, which would have pushed complexity onto users and broken existing integrations. Instead, the routing logic lives entirely within the infrastructure layer.
Developer Simplicity: This meant that engineers writing application features shouldn’t need to consider multi-region logic in their code. This constraint influenced numerous implementation details, from the choice to replicate entire deployments rather than shard databases to the decision to handle all synchronization through background tasks rather than synchronous cross-region calls.
Feature Parity: Every Linear feature, integration, and API endpoint must function identically regardless of which region hosts a workspace. This eliminated the possibility of region-specific feature flags or degraded functionality, which would have simplified the implementation but compromised the user experience.
Full Regional Isolation: This meant that each region operates independently. A database failure, deployment issue, or traffic spike in one region cannot affect the other. This isolation provides both reliability benefits and operational flexibility. Each region can be scaled, deployed, and maintained independently based on its specific requirements.
The following architecture diagram reveals a three-tier structure.
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User-facing clients (API users, the Linear web client, and OAuth applications) all connect to a central proxy layer. This proxy communicates with an authentication service to determine request routing, then forwards traffic to one of two regional deployments. Each region contains a complete Linear stack: API servers, sync engine, background task processors, and databases.
The proxy layer, implemented using Cloudflare Workers, serves as the routing brain of the system. When a request arrives, the proxy extracts authentication information, queries the auth service for the workspace's region, and obtains a signed JWT, then forwards the request to the appropriate regional deployment. This happens on every request, though caching mechanisms reduce the overhead for frequent requests from the same client.
The resulting architecture trades implementation complexity for operational benefits and user experience. Rather than distributing complexity across the application or pushing it onto users, Linear concentrated it within well-defined infrastructure components—primarily the proxy and authentication service.
Technical Implementation Phases
There were three main phases to the technical implementation:
1 - Infrastructure as Code Transformation
Before implementing multi-region support, Linear's infrastructur