We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Active geo-replication and Auto-failover groups for Azure SQL Hyperscale tier. Both these capabilities help to have a turn key business continuity solution for Azure SQL DB that lets you perform quick disaster recovery of databases in case of a regional disaster or a large scale outage.
Active geo-replication
Key benefits of Active geo-replication are
- Automatic asynchronous replication at the database level where data changes to the primary database are automatically replicated to a secondary database.
- Cross-region redundancy allowing applications to recover from loss of an entire region.
- Readable and online secondary databases that can be used for read-only workloads such as reporting.
- Secondary database can be created in a different region or in the same region as primary database.
How does Active Geo-replication work for Hyperscale?
When creating a geo-replica for Hyperscale, the geo secondary is seeded with data from the primary and is a size of data operation. A geo-replica does not share page servers with the primary, even if they are in the same region. This provides the necessary redundancy for geo-failovers.
Auto-failover groups
Key benefits of Auto-failover groups are:
- Simplified management of a group of geo-replicated databases including ability to failover the entire group of databases.
- Ability for application to maintain the same read-write and read-only endpoints after failover.
- Recovery during loss of an entire region through geo-failover which can be initiated manually or through an automatic failover policy.
- Readable online secondaries that can be used for read-only workloads by connecting with read-only listener endpoints which remain unchanged during geo-failovers.
How Auto-failover groups work for Hyperscale?
Auto-failover groups are created between servers in two regions. The groups can include all or some databases in the servers. If a Hyperscale database is selected to be part of the failover group, then this database will failover with the rest of the failover group unit. The following diagram illustrates a typical configuration of a geo-redundant cloud application using multiple databases and auto-failover group.
Available regions
Both Active geo-replication and Auto-failover groups are supported in all regions where Azure SQL DB Hyperscale is supported.
Get started
To get started, refer to the following articles: