Overview
Do you have a data disaster recovery plan for your Azure Database for MySQL server workloads? Have you conducted a disaster recovery drill to make sure your disaster recovery plan is effective?
Whether it's a natural disaster shutting down all the power in a region and its data centers or an occasional regional outage, it's of utmost importance to be prepared for the possibility of an emergency or crisis.
Just as a cricket team would never head into their matches without first practicing, your first responders can’t be expected to manage critical failures in an emergency situation without stepping through a simulation or plan ahead of time. While a disaster recovery drill can never completely recreate the scenario, simulating drills will help ensure that those on the front lines understand their responsibilities and how to get the critical systems up and running with minimal downtime.
Geo-restore and drill simulation
Geo-restore allows you to recover from a geographic disaster when you cannot access your database or backups in the primary region. It creates a new database on any existing server or managed instance, in any Azure region. Geo-restore is available for an Azure Database for MySQL server for which Geo-redundancy is enabled (Compute+Storage setting).
To simulate a region-down scenario, stop the designated geo-redundant server test workload.
Now, you can try geo-restoring a stopped server to the most recent backup available. This will help you estimate recovery time and impact for your test Azure Database for MySQL server workloads in case of a regional outage, preparing your first responders with a line of action to go through on D-day.
To perform the geo-restore, in the Azure CLI, run the following command:
az mysql flexible-server geo-restore \
--source-server
--location
[--name]
[--no-wait]
[--resource-group]
[--subscription]
For example, let's geo-restore as server named 'mydemoserver' in the East US region to a new server named 'mydemoserver-restored' in the geo-paired West US region with the same network setting. To accomplish this, run the following command:
az mysql flexible-server geo-restore \
--source-server mydemoserver \
--location "West US" \
--name mydemoserver-restored \
--resource-group myresourcegroup
Summary
Enabling geo-redundancy enables you to recover from a geographic disaster or regional failure when your users can’t access the server in the primary region. With this feature enabled, you can perform geo-restore and deploy a new server to the geo-paired Azure region leveraging the original server’s latest available geo-redundant backup. Azure Database for MySQL now provides you with the ability to simulate region-down scenarios so that you can make an informed choice about whether to leverage the benefits of geo-redundancy and geo-restore for your flexible server workloads.
If you have any feedback or questions about the information provided above, please leave a comment below or email us at AskAzureDBforMySQL@service.microsoft.com. Thank you!