Skip main navigation

Build a highly available architecture

"How do you ensure your system is always operational?" This article will teach you about high availability.

In the previous step, we received a brief introduction to this activity and we also saw the learning outcomes. In this step, you will learn how to build a highly available architecture.

High availability (HA) ensures your architecture can handle failures. Imagine you’re responsible for a system that must be always fully operational. Failures can and will happen, so how do you ensure that your system can remain online when something goes wrong? How do you perform maintenance without service interruption?

Here, you’ll learn the need for high availability, evaluate application high-availability requirements, and see how the Azure platform helps you meet your availability goals.

Evaluate high availability for your architecture

There are three steps to evaluate an application for high availability:

  1. Determine the service-level agreement of your application
  2. Evaluate the HA capabilities of the application
  3. Evaluate the HA capabilities of dependent applications

Let’s explore these steps in detail.

Determine the service-level agreement of your application

A service-level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider and a service consumer, in which the service provider commits to a standard of service based on measurable metrics and defined responsibilities. SLAs can be strict, legally bound, contractual agreements, or assumed expectations of availability by customers. Service metrics typically focus on service throughput, capacity, and availability, all of which can be measured in various ways. Regardless of the specific metrics that make up the SLA, failure to meet the SLA can have serious financial ramifications for the service provider. A common component of service agreements is guaranteed financial reimbursement for missed SLAs.

Service-level objectives (SLO) are the values of target metrics that are used to measure performance, reliability, or availability. These could be metrics defining the performance of request processing in milliseconds, the availability of services in minutes per month, or the number of requests processed per hour. By evaluating the metrics exposed by your application and understanding what customers use as a measure of quality, you can define the acceptable and unacceptable ranges for these SLOs. By defining these objectives, you clearly set goals and expectations with both the teams supporting the services and customers who are consuming these services. These SLOs will be used to determine if your overall SLA is being met.

The following table shows the potential cumulative downtime for various SLA levels.

SLA Downtime per week Downtime per month Downtime per year
99% 1.68 hours 7.2 hours 3.65 days
99.9% 10.1 minutes 43.2 minutes 8.76 hours
99.95% 5 minutes 21.6 minutes 4.38 hours
99.99% 1.01 minutes 4.32 minutes 52.56 minutes
99.999% 6 seconds 25.9 seconds 5.26 minutes

Higher availability is better, everything else being equal. But as you strive for more 9’s, the cost and complexity to achieve that level of availability grows. An uptime of 99.99% translates to about 5 minutes of total downtime per month. Is it worth the additional complexity and cost to reach five 9s? The answer depends on the business requirements.

Here are some other considerations when defining an SLA:

  • To achieve four 9’s (99.99%), you probably can’t rely on manual intervention to recover from failures. The application must be self-diagnosing and self-healing.
  • Beyond four 9’s, it’s challenging to detect outages quickly enough to meet the SLA.
  • Think about the time window against which your SLA is measured. The smaller the window, the tighter the tolerances. It probably doesn’t make sense to define your SLA in terms of hourly or daily uptime.

Identifying SLAs is an important first step when determining the high availability capabilities that your architecture will require. These will help shape the methods you’ll use to make your application highly available.

Evaluate the HA capabilities of the application

To evaluate the HA capabilities of your application, perform a failure analysis. Focus on single points of failure and critical components that would have a large impact on the application if they were unreachable, misconfigured, or started behaving unexpectedly. For areas that do have redundancy, determine whether the application is capable of detecting error conditions and self-healing.

You’ll need to carefully evaluate all components of your application, including the pieces designed to provide HA functionality, such as load balancers. Single points of failure will either need to be modified to have HA capabilities integrated, or will need to be replaced with services that can provide HA capabilities.

Evaluate the HA capabilities of dependent applications

You’ll need to understand not only your application’s SLA requirements to your consumer, but also the provided SLAs of any resource that your application may depend on. If you are committing an uptime to your customers of 99.9%, but a service your application depends on only has an uptime commitment of 99%, this could put you at risk of not meeting your SLA to your customers. If a dependent service is unable to provide a sufficient SLA, you may need to modify your own SLA, replace the dependency with an alternative, or find ways to meet your SLA while the dependency is unavailable. Depending on the scenario and the nature of the dependency, you can temporarily work around failing dependencies with solutions like caches and work queues.

Azure’s highly available platform

The Azure cloud platform has been designed to provide high availability throughout all its services. Like any system, applications may be affected by both hardware and software platform events. The need to design your application architecture to handle failures is critical, and the Azure cloud platform provides you with the tools and capabilities to make your application highly available. There are several core concepts when considering HA for your architecture on Azure:

  • Availability sets
  • Availability zones
  • Load balancing
  • Platform as a service (PaaS) HA capabilities

Availability sets

Availability sets are a way for you to inform Azure that VMs that belong to the same application workload should be distributed to prevent simultaneous impact from hardware failure and scheduled maintenance. Availability sets are made up of update domains and fault domains.

Availability sets

Update domains ensure that a subset of your application’s servers always remain running when the virtual machine hosts in an Azure datacenter require downtime for maintenance. Most updates can be performed with no impact to the VMs running on them, but there are times when this isn’t possible. To ensure that updates don’t happen to a whole datacenter at once, the Azure datacenter is logically sectioned into update domains (UD). When a maintenance event occurs, such as a performance update and critical security patch that needs to be applied to the host, the update is sequenced through update domains. The use of sequencing updates using update domains ensures that the whole datacenter isn’t unavailable during platform updates and patching.

While update domains represent a logical section of the datacenter, fault domains (FD) represent physical sections of the datacenter and ensure rack diversity of servers in an availability set. Fault domains align to the physical separation of shared hardware in the datacenter. This includes power, cooling, and network hardware that supports the physical servers located in server racks. In the event the hardware that supports a server rack has become unavailable, only that rack of servers would be affected by the outage. By placing your VMs in an availability set, your VMs will be automatically spread across multiple FDs so that in the event of a hardware failure, only part of your VMs will be impacted.

With availability sets, you can ensure your application remains online if a high-impact maintenance event is required or hardware failures occur.

Availability zones

Availability zones are independent physical datacenter locations within a region that include their own power, cooling, and networking. By taking availability zones into account when deploying resources, you can protect workloads from datacenter outages while retaining presence in a particular region. Services like virtual machines are zonal services and allow you to deploy them to specific zones within a region. Other services are zone-redundant services and will replicate across the availability zones in the specific Azure region. Both types ensure that there are no single points of failure within an Azure region.

Avalibility sets

Supported regions contain a minimum of three availability zones. When creating zonal service resources in those regions, you’ll have the ability to select the zone in which the resource should be created. This will allow you to design your application to withstand a zonal outage and continue to operate in an Azure region before having to evacuate your application to another Azure region.

Availability zones are a newer high-availability configuration service for Azure regions, and are currently available for certain regions. It’s important to check the availability of this service in the region in which you’re planning to deploy your application if you want to consider this functionality. Availability zones are supported when using virtual machines, as well as several PaaS services. Availability zones are mutually exclusive with availability sets. When using availability zones, you no longer need to define an availability set for your systems. You’ll have diversity at the data-center level, and updates will never be performed to multiple availability zones at the same time.

Load balancing

Load balancers manage how network traffic is distributed across an application. Load balancers are essential in keeping your application resilient to individual component failures and to ensure your application is available to process requests. For applications that don’t have service discovery built in, load balancing is required for both availability sets and availability zones.

Azure possesses three load-balancing technology services that are distinct in their abilities to route network traffic:

  • Azure Traffic Manager provides global DNS load balancing. You’d consider using Traffic Manager to provide load balancing of DNS endpoints within or across Azure regions. Traffic manager will distribute requests to available endpoints and use endpoint monitoring to detect and remove failed endpoints from load.
  • Azure Application Gateway provides Layer 7 load-balancing capabilities, such as round-robin distribution of incoming traffic, cookie-based session affinity, URL path-based routing, and the ability to host multiple websites behind a single application gateway. Application Gateway monitors the health of all resources in its back-end pool by default, and automatically removes any resource considered unhealthy from the pool. Application Gateway continues to monitor the unhealthy instances and adds them back to the healthy back-end pool once they become available and respond to health probes.
  • Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 load balancer. You can configure public and internal load-balanced endpoints and define rules to map inbound connections to back-end pool destinations by using TCP and HTTP health-probing options to manage service availability.

One or a combination of all three Azure load-balancing technologies can ensure you have the necessary options available to architect a highly available solution to route network traffic through your application.

Azue load balancer

PaaS HA capabilities

PaaS services come with high availability built in. Services such as Azure SQL Database, Azure App Service, and Azure Service Bus include high availability features and ensure that failures of an individual component of the service will be seamless to your application. Using PaaS services is one of the best ways to ensure that your architecture is highly available.

When architecting for high availability, you’ll want to understand the SLA that you’re committing to your customers. Then you’ll evaluate both the HA capabilities that your application has and the HA capabilities and SLAs of dependent systems. After those have been established, use Azure features, such as availability sets, availability zones, and various load-balancing technologies to add HA capabilities to your application. Any PaaS services you should choose to use will have HA capabilities built in.

Develop a disaster recovery strategy

Designing for high availability helps keep an application or process running despite unfavorable events and adverse conditions. But what do you do when something so significant happens that you’ve lost data, and it’s impossible to keep your apps and processes from going down? When disaster strikes, you need to have a plan to get your services running again. You should know what your goals and expectations are for recovering, the costs and limitations of your plan, and how to execute on it.

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery is about recovering from high-impact events that result in downtime and data loss. A disaster is a single, major event with an impact much larger and long-lasting than the application can mitigate through the high-availability portion of its design.

The word disaster often evokes thoughts of natural disasters and external events (earthquakes, floods, tropical storms, and so on) but many other kinds of disasters exist as well. A failed deployment or upgrade can leave an app in an unrecognizable state. Malicious hackers can encrypt or delete data and inflict other kinds of damage that take an app offline or eliminate some of its functionality.

Regardless of its cause, the best remedy for a disaster once it has occurred is a well-defined, tested disaster recovery plan and an application that actively supports disaster recovery efforts through its design.

How to create a disaster recovery plan

A disaster recovery plan is a single document that details the procedures that are required to recover from data loss and downtime caused by a disaster and identifies who’s in charge of directing those procedures. Operators should be able to use the plan as a manual to restore application connectivity and recover data after a disaster occurs. A detailed, written plan that’s dedicated to disaster recovery is critical to ensuring a favorable outcome. The process of creating the plan will help to assemble a complete picture of the application. The resulting written steps will promote good decision-making and follow-through in the panicked, chaotic aftermath of a disaster event.

Creating a disaster recovery plan requires expert knowledge of the application’s workflows, data, infrastructure, and dependencies.

Risk assessment and process inventory

The first step in creating a disaster recovery plan is performing a risk analysis that examines the impact of different kinds of disasters on the application. The exact nature of a disaster isn’t as important to the risk analysis as its potential impact through data loss and application downtime. Explore various kinds of hypothetical disasters and try to be specific when thinking about their effects. For example, a targeted malicious attack may modify code or data that results in a different kind of impact than an earthquake that disrupts network connectivity and datacenter availability.

The risk assessment needs to consider every process that can’t afford unlimited downtime, and every category of data that can’t afford unlimited loss. When a disaster that affects multiple application components occurs, it’s critical that the plan owners can use the plan to take a complete inventory of what needs attention and how to prioritize each item.

Some apps may only consist of a single process or classification of data. This is still important to note, as the application will likely be one component of a larger disaster recovery plan that includes multiple applications with the organization.

Recovery objectives

A complete plan needs to specify two critical business requirements for each process implemented by the application:

  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum duration of acceptable data loss. RPO is measured in units of time, not volume: “30 minutes of data”, “four hours of data”, and so on. RPO is about limiting and recovering from data loss, not data theft.
  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum duration of acceptable downtime, where “downtime” needs to be defined by your specification. For example, if the acceptable downtime duration is eight hours in the event of a disaster, then your RTO is eight hours.

RPO to Rto line graphic

Each major process or workload that’s implemented by an app should have separate RPO and RTO values. Even if you arrive at the same values for different processes, each one should be generated through a separate analysis that examines disaster-scenario risks and potential recovery strategies for each respective process.

The process of specifying an RPO and RTO is effectively the creation of disaster recovery requirements for your application. It requires establishing the priority of each workload and category of data and performing a cost-benefit analysis. The analysis includes concerns, such as implementation and maintenance cost, operational expense, process overhead, performance impact, and the impact of downtime and lost data. You’ll need to define exactly what “downtime” means for your application, and in some cases, you may establish separate RPO and RTO values for different levels of functionality. Specifying RPO and RTO should be more than simply choosing arbitrary values. Much of the value of a disaster recovery plan comes from the research and analysis that goes into discovering the potential impact of a disaster and the cost of mitigating the risks.

Detailing recovery steps

The final plan should go into detail about exactly what steps should be taken to restore lost data and application connectivity. Steps often include information about:

  • Backups: How often they’re created, where they’re located, and how to restore data from them
  • Data replicas: The number and locations of replicas, the nature and consistency characteristics of the replicated data, and how to switch over to a different replica
  • Deployments: How deployments are executed, how rollbacks occur, and failure scenarios for deployments
  • Infrastructure: On-premises and cloud resources, network infrastructure, and hardware inventory
  • Dependencies: External services that are used by the application, including SLAs and contact information
  • Configuration and notification: Flags or options that can be set to gracefully degrade the application, and services that are used to notify users of application impact The exact steps that are required will depend heavily on implementation details of the app, making it important to keep the plan updated. Routinely testing the plan will help identify gaps and outdated sections.

Designing for disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is not an automatic feature. It must be designed, built, and tested. An app that needs to support a solid disaster recovery strategy must be built from the ground up with disaster recovery in mind. Azure offers services, features, and guidance to help you create apps that support disaster recovery, but it’s up to you to include them in your design.

Designing for disaster recovery has two main concerns:

  • Data recovery: Using backups and replication to restore lost data
  • Process recovery: Recovering services and deploying code to recover from outages

Data recovery and replication

Replication duplicates stored data between multiple data store replicas. Unlike backup, which creates long-lived, read-only snapshots of data for use in recovery, replication creates real-time or near-real-time copies of live data. The goal of replication is to keep replicas synchronized with as little latency as possible while maintaining application responsiveness. Replication is a key component of designing for high availability and disaster recovery, and is a common feature of production-grade applications.

Replication is used to mitigate a failed or unreachable data store by executing a failover: changing application configuration to route data requests to a working replica. Failover is often automated, triggered by error detection built into a data-storage product, or detection that you implement through your monitoring solution. Depending on the implementation and the scenario, failover may need to be manually executed by system operators.

Replication is not something you implement from scratch. Most fully featured database systems and other data-storage products and services include some kind of replication as a tightly integrated feature due to its functional and performance requirements. However, it’s up to you to include these features in your application design and make appropriate use of them.

Different Azure services support various levels and concepts of replication. For example:

  • Azure Storage replication capabilities depend on the type of replication that is selected for the storage account. This replication can be local (within a datacenter), zonal (between data centers within a region), or regional (between regions). Neither your application nor your operators interact with it directly. Failovers are automatic and transparent, and you simply need to select a replication level that balances cost and risk.
  • Azure SQL Database replication is automatic at a small scale, but recovery from a full Azure datacenter or regional outage requires geo-replication. Setting up geo-replication is manual, but it’s a first-class feature of the service, and well-supported by documentation.
  • Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed database system, and replication is central to its implementation. With Azure Cosmos DB, you can configure options related to regions associated with your database, data partitioning, and data consistency.

Many different replication designs exist that place different priorities on data consistency, performance, and cost. Active replication requires updates to take place on multiple replicas simultaneously, guaranteeing consistency at the cost of throughput. In contrast, passive replication performs synchronization in the background, removing replication as a constraint on application performance, but increasing RPO. Active-active or multi-master replication enables multiple replicas to be used simultaneously, enabling load balancing at the cost of complicating data consistency, while active-passive replication reserves replicas for live use only during failover.

Important:
Neither replication nor backup are complete disaster recovery solutions on their own. Data recovery is only one component of disaster recovery, and replication will not fully satisfy many kinds of disaster recovery scenarios. For example, in a data-corruption scenario, the nature of the corruption may allow it to spread from the primary data store to the replicas, rendering all the replicas useless and requiring a backup for recovery.

Process recovery

After a disaster, business data isn’t the only asset that needs recovering. Disaster scenarios will also commonly result in downtime, whether it’s due to network connectivity problems, datacenter outages, or damaged VM instances or software deployments. The design of your application needs to allow you to restore it to a working state.
In most cases, process restoration involves failover to a separate, working deployment. Depending on the scenario, geographic location may be a critical aspect. For example, a large-scale natural disaster that brings an entire Azure region offline will necessitate restoring service in another region. Your application’s disaster recovery requirements, especially RTO, should drive your design and help you decide how many replicated environments you should have, where they should be located, and whether they should be maintained in a ready-to-run state or should be ready to accept a deployment in the event of disaster.
Depending on the design of your application, there are a few different strategies and Azure services and features that you can take advantage of to improve your app’s support for process recovery after a disaster.

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is a service that’s dedicated to managing process recovery for workloads running on VMs deployed to Azure, VMs running on physical servers, and workloads running directly on physical servers. Site Recovery replicates workloads to alternate locations and helps you to failover when an outage occurs and supports testing of a disaster recovery plan.
Site Recovery supports replicating whole VMs and physical server images as well as individual workloads, where a workload may be an individual application or an entire VM or operating system with its applications. Any application workload can be replicated, but Site Recovery has first-class integrated support for many Microsoft server applications, such as SQL Server and SharePoint, as well as a handful of third-party applications like SAP.
Any app that runs on VMs or physical servers should at least investigate the use of Azure Site Recovery. It’s a great way to discover and explore scenarios and possibilities for process recovery.

Service-specific features

You might also have apps that run on Azure PaaS offerings like App Service. Most such services offer features and guidance for supporting disaster recovery. For certain scenarios, you can use service-specific features to support fast recovery. For example, Azure SQL Server supports geo-replication for quickly restoring service in another region. Azure App Service has a Backup and Restore feature, and the documentation includes guidance for using Azure Traffic Manager to support routing traffic to a secondary region.

Testing a disaster recovery plan

Disaster recovery planning doesn’t end once you have a completed plan in hand. Testing the plan is a crucial aspect of disaster recovery to ensure that the directions and explanations are clear and up-to-date.
Choose intervals to perform different types and scopes of tests, such as testing backups and failover mechanisms every month, and performing a full-scale disaster recovery simulation every six months. Always follow the steps and details exactly as they’re documented in the plan, and consider having someone unfamiliar with the plan give perspective on anything that could be made clearer. As you execute the test, identify gaps, areas of improvement, and places to automate and add these enhancements to your plan.
Make sure to include your monitoring system in your testing as well. For example, if your application supports automated failover, introduce failures in a dependency or other critical component to ensure that the application behaves correctly end-to-end, including detection of the failure and triggering of the automated failover.
By carefully identifying your requirements and laying out a plan, you’ll be able to determine what types of services you’ll need to use to meet your recovery objectives. Azure provides several services and features to help you meet these objectives.

Protect your data with backup and restore

Backup is the final and most powerful line of defense against permanent data loss. An effective backup strategy requires more than simply making copies of data. It needs to take your application’s data architecture and infrastructure into consideration. Your app may manage many kinds of data of varying importance, spread widely across filesystems, databases, and other storage services both in the cloud and on-premises. Using the right services and products for the job will simplify your backup process and decrease recovery time if a backup needs to be restored.

Establish backup and restoration requirements

As with a disaster recovery strategy, backup requirements are based on a cost-benefit analysis. Analysis of your app’s data should be guided by the relative importance of the different categories of data the app manages, as well as external requirements, such as data retention laws.
To establish backup requirements for your app, group your application’s data based on the following requirements:
  • How much of this type of data can afford to be lost, measured in duration
  • The maximum amount of time a restore of this type of data should require
  • Backup retention requirements: how long and at what frequency do backups need to remain available
These concepts map neatly to the concepts of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective (RPO and RTO). The duration of acceptable loss will generally translate directly to required backup intervals and RPO. The maximum amount of time a restore takes corresponds to the RTO for the data component of your application. Both requirements should be developed relative to the cost of achieving them. Every organization would like to say that they truly can’t afford to lose any data, but often that’s not the case when the cost of achieving that requirement is considered.
Backup absolutely plays a role in disaster recovery (DR), but backups, restores and their associated scenarios extend beyond the scope of DR. Backups may need to be restored in non-disaster situations, including those where RTO and RPO aren’t of great concern. For example, if a small amount of data older than your backup interval is corrupted or deleted, but the application doesn’t experience downtime, your application may never be in danger of missing its SLA and a successful restore will result in no data lost. Your disaster recovery plan may or may not include guidance on performing restores in non-disaster situations.
Tip:
Don’t confuse archival, replication, and backup. Archival is the storage of data for long-term preservation and read access. Replication is the near-real-time copying of data between replicas to support high availability and certain disaster recovery scenarios. Some requirements, such as data retention laws, may influence your strategies for all three of these concerns. Archival, replication, and backup all require separate analysis and implementation.

Azure backup and restore capabilities

Azure offers several backup-related services and features for various scenarios, including data in Azure as well as on-premises data. Most Azure services offer some kind of backup functionality. Here, we’ll look at a few of the most popular backup-related Azure offerings.

Azure Backup

Azure Backup is a family of backup products that back up data to Azure Recovery Services vaults for storage and recovery. Recovery Service vaults are storage resources in Azure that are dedicated to holding data and configuration backups for virtual machines, servers, and individual workstations and workloads.

Azure Backup serves as a general-purpose backup solution for cloud and on-premises workflows that run on VMs or physical servers. It’s designed to be a drop-in replacement for traditional backup solutions that stores data in Azure instead of archive tapes or other local physical media.

Four different products and services can use Azure Backup to create backups:

  • Azure Backup Agent is a small Windows application that backs up files, folders, and system state from the Windows VM or server on which it’s installed. It works in a way that’s similar to many consumer cloud-based backup solutions, but requires configuration of an Azure Recovery vault. Once you download and install it onto a Windows server or VM, you can configure it to create backups up to three times a day.
  • System Center Data Protection Manager is a robust, fully featured, enterprise-level backup and recovery system. Data Protection Manager is a Windows Server application that can back up file systems and virtual machines (Windows and Linux), create bare-metal backups of physical servers, and perform application-aware backup of many Microsoft server products, such as SQL Server and Exchange. Data Protection Manager is part of the System Center family of products and is licensed and sold with System Center, but it’s considered part of the Azure Backup family because it can store backups in an Azure Recovery vault.
  • Azure Backup Server is similar to Data Protection Manager, but it’s licensed as part of an Azure subscription and doesn’t require a System Center license. Azure Backup Server supports the same functionality as Data Protection Manager except for local tape backup and integration with the other System Center products.
  • Azure IaaS VM Backup is a turnkey backup and restore feature of Azure Virtual Machines. VM backup supports once-per-day backups for Windows and Linux virtual machines. It supports recovery of individual files, full disks, and entire VMs, and can also perform application-consistent backups. Individual applications can be made aware of backup operations and get their filesystem resources into a consistent state before the snapshot is taken.

Azure backup agent

Azure Backup can add value and contribute to the backup and restore strategy for IaaS and on-premises applications of virtually any size and shape.

Azure Blob storage

Azure Storage doesn’t include an automated backup feature, but blobs are commonly used to back up all kinds of data from various sources. Many services that provide backup capabilities use blobs to store their data, and blobs are a common target for scripts and tools in every kind of backup scenario.

General Purpose v2 storage accounts support three different blob-storage tiers of varying performance and cost. Cool storage offers the best cost-to-performance ratio for most backups, as opposed to hot storage, which offers lower access costs but higher storage costs. Archive-tier storage may be appropriate for secondary backups or backups of data with low expectations for recovery time. It’s low in cost, but requires up to 15 hours of lead time to access.

Immutable blob storage is configurable to be non-erasable and non-modifiable for a user-specified interval. Immutable blob storage was designed primarily to fulfill strict requirements for certain kinds of data, such as financial data. It’s a great option for ensuring that backups are protected against accidental deletion or modification.

Azure SQL Database

Comprehensive, automatic backup functionality is included with Azure SQL Database at no extra charge. Full backups are created weekly, with differential backups performed every 12 hours, and log backups created every five minutes. Backups created by the service can be used to restore a database to a specific point in time, even if it’s been deleted. Restores can be performed using the Azure portal, PowerShell, or the REST API. Backups for databases encrypted with Transparent Data Encryption, enabled by default, are also encrypted.

SQL Database backup is enterprise-grade, production ready, and enabled by default. If you’re evaluating different database options for an app, it should be included as part of cost-benefit analysis, as it’s a significant benefit of the service. Every app that uses Azure SQL Database should take advantage of it by including it in their disaster recovery plan and backup/restore procedures.

Azure App Service

Web applications hosted in the Azure App Service Standard and Premium tiers support turnkey-scheduled and manual backups. Backups include configuration and file contents, as well as contents of databases used by the app. They also support simple filters for excluding files. Restore operations can target different App Service instances, making App Service backup a simple way to move one app’s contents to another.

App Service backups are limited to 10 GB total, including app and database content. They’re a good solution for new apps under development and small-scale apps. More mature applications won’t generally use App Service backup. They will instead rely on robust deployment and rollback procedures, storage strategies that don’t use application disk storage, and dedicated backup strategies for databases and persistent storage.

Verify backups and test restore procedures

No backup system is complete without a strategy for verifying backups and testing restore procedures. Even if you use a dedicated backup service or product, you should still document and practice recovery procedures to ensure that they’re well-understood and return the system to the expected state.

Strategies for verifying backups vary and will depend on the nature of your infrastructure. You may want to consider techniques like creating a new deployment of the application, restoring the backup to it, and comparing the state of the two instances. In many cases, this technique closely mimics actual disaster recovery procedures. Simply performing a comparison of a subset of the backup data with the live data immediately after creating a backup is enough. A common component of backup verification is attempting to restore old backups to ensure that they’re still available and operational, and that the backup system hasn’t changed in a way that renders them incompatible.

Any strategy is better than finding out that your backups are corrupted or incomplete while attempting to recover from a disaster.

A backup and restore strategy is an important part of ensuring your architecture can recover from the loss or corruption of data. Review your architecture to define your backup and restore requirements. Azure provides several services and features to provide backup and restore capabilities to any architecture.

In the following step, we will explore what high availability is. Remember to click on Mark as complete and then Next to continue.

This article is from the free online

Designing Infrastructure Solutions with Microsoft Azure Architecture

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now