ADR-012: A US region for Ridgeway Freight

Status: accepted · Date: 27 October 2025 · Decided by: Rafael Duarte, Mira Holm, Quinn Maas

Context

Ridgeway Freight, 18 depots in the USA, wants to sign. Their contract requires their people's data to be stored and processed in the USA. Under ADR-006 that means a third region. It is one customer, and a region costs us money and attention every month whether one client uses it or ten.

Options:

1. Open a US region (Virginia).
2. Serve Ridgeway from the EU with contract terms. Their legal team said no.
3. Decline the deal.

Decision

Open a US region in AWS us-east-1 (Virginia), built from the same infrastructure code as the UK region, with its own backups and keys. Ridgeway is its first client. Support for US clients still works from the EU, through the same logged and approved support access as everywhere.

Consequences

• A third stack to patch, monitor and restore-test. Restore drills rotate through three regions now.
• Deploys go US first, as the smallest region (Release process).
• Mail and SMS for US clients go through the same providers as the rest.
• Sales can offer the US region to other US prospects without a new decision.

Updates

• 8 December 2025: contract signed; region build started.
• 12 January 2026: production-us live; Ridgeway onboarded.
• 19 January 2026: first restore drill in the US region passed.