Design backup, disaster recovery, and high availability solutions.
Covers designing solutions for backup and disaster recovery that meet recovery objectives for Azure and hybrid workloads, and designing high availability solutions for compute, relational data, and semi-structured/unstructured data.
5 minutes
5 Questions
Design business continuity solutions in Azure focuses on ensuring applications and data remain available during disruptions, minimizing downtime and data loss. As an Azure Solutions Architect Expert, you must understand key concepts and services that enable resilient architectures.
**Recovery Objectives:**
Two critical metrics guide business continuity planning: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines the maximum acceptable downtime, while Recovery Point Objective (RPO) specifies the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. These objectives determine which Azure services and configurations are appropriate.
**High Availability Strategies:**
Azure provides Availability Zones, which are physically separate datacenters within a region, offering 99.99% SLA for VMs. Availability Sets distribute VMs across fault and update domains within a datacenter. Load balancers and Traffic Manager enable traffic distribution across healthy instances.
**Disaster Recovery Solutions:**
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) orchestrates replication, failover, and recovery of workloads between regions or from on-premises to Azure. It supports VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers. Geo-redundant storage (GRS) automatically replicates data to a secondary region.
**Backup Solutions:**
Azure Backup provides centralized backup management for VMs, SQL databases, Azure Files, and on-premises workloads. Recovery Services Vaults store backup data with configurable retention policies.
**Database Continuity:**
Azure SQL Database offers active geo-replication and auto-failover groups for database-level disaster recovery. Cosmos DB provides multi-region writes with automatic failover capabilities.
**Architecture Considerations:**
Design stateless application tiers when possible, externalize session state, implement health probes, and use queue-based load leveling to handle traffic spikes. Consider cost implications as higher availability typically requires additional resources.
**Testing and Documentation:**
Regularly test failover procedures and document runbooks for disaster scenarios. Use Azure Chaos Studio to simulate failures and validate resilience. Maintain updated business impact analyses to prioritize critical workloads appropriately.Design business continuity solutions in Azure focuses on ensuring applications and data remain available during disruptions, minimizing downtime and data loss. As an Azure Solutions Architect Expert, you must understand key concepts and services that enable resilient architectures.
**Recovery Obje…