High availability (HA) refers to the goal of keeping a system or application operational and available to users a very high percentage of the time, minimizing both planned and unplanned downtime.
Regardless of whether an instance of IRIS is in the cloud or not, high availability and disaster recovery are always important considerations. While IKO already allows for the use of NodeSelectors to enforce the scheduling of IRISCluster nodes across multiple zones, multi-region k8s clusters are generally not recommended or even supported in the major CSP's managed Kubernetes solutions. However, when discussing HA and DR for IRIS, we may want to have an async member in a completely separate region, or even in a different cloud provider altogether.