Azure business continuity / Disaster Recovery

Question

Hello Azure-Community,

we are using an AKS Cluster at the moment and last week we had the case that the application was down for a whole day.

1. What are cost effective recovery strategies? I read about geo replication where I need to upgrade the container registration to Premium. Would that be recommendable?
2. What is the difference between geo replication of the container image and the Recovery Services vault?

Kind regards

Answer 1

@Pablo S Apologies for the delay in response and all the inconvenience caused because of the issue.

Azure Backup is one of the service designed to back up and restore data, and Azure Site Recovery is designed to perform seamless application disaster recovery. Together, these services provide a more complete backup and recovery solution that can be implemented and scaled with just a few clicks.

By not having to build on-premises solutions or maintain a costly secondary datacenter, users can reduce the cost of deploying, monitoring, and patching disaster recovery infrastructure. Azure Backup uses flexible policies to automatically allocate and manage storage to optimize cost and meet business objectives.

Azure’s centralized management interface for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery makes it simple and easy to define policies to natively protect a wide range of enterprise workloads including Azure Virtual Machines, SQL and SAP databases, Azure File shares and on-premises Windows servers or Linux VMs. Using Azure Site Recovery, users can set up and manage replication, failover, and failback from the Azure portal. Customers can also take advantage of the Windows Admin Center Azure Hybrid Services Hub to protect on-premises virtual machines (VMs) and enable Azure Backup and Site Recovery right from the Windows Admin Center console.

You can read more about it here.

To understand more about Azure Backup refer this and Azure Site Recovery here.

Companies that want a local presence, or a hot backup, choose to run services from multiple Azure regions. As a best practice, placing a container registry in each region where images are run allows network-close operations, enabling fast, reliable image layer transfers. Geo-replication enables an Azure container registry to function as a single registry, serving multiple regions with multi-master regional registries.

As mentioned in this article Geo-replication is a feature of Premium registries. If your registry isn't yet Premium, you can change from Basic and Standard to Premium in the Azure portal which confirm on your first query and hence depending upon your requirement you can chose the options.

Coming to your second query The Recovery Services vault is an entity that stores the backups and recovery points created over time. Azure Backup automatically handles storage for the vault. The LRS and GRS mean to the Storage Replication type. Read the storage replication strategy.

The storage redundancy configuration for the Recovery Services Vault (RSV), is specific to Azure Backup data, not Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

This means, in the event of an Azure region failure, if the RSV is configured with Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS), then (with the help of the Azure support team), the RSV can be made available in the paired Azure region, and the data would be accessible.

You can refer to this documentation as well for more information.

This is just generic information on backup and recovery. It might not be the required information you are looking for so do let me know if you have any further queries in the comment section.

Hope it helps!!!

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