Cross-region replication solutions for nonpaired regions
Some Azure services support cross-region replication to ensure business continuity and protect against data loss. These services make use of another secondary region that uses cross-region replication. Both the primary and secondary regions together form a region pair.
However, there are some regions that are nonpaired and so require alternative methods to achieving geo-replication.
This document lists some of the services and possible solutions that support geo-replication methods without requiring paired regions.
Azure API Management
Azure API Management doesn't provide a real cross-region replication feature. However, you can use its backup and restore feature to export the configuration of an API Management service instance in one region and import it into another region. As long as the storage account used for the backup is accessible from the target region, there's no paired region dependency. An operational guidance is provided in this article.
Azure App Service
For App Service, custom backups are stored on a selected storage account. As a result, there's a dependency for cross-region restore on GRS and paired regions. For automatic backup type, you can't backup/restore across regions. As a workaround, you can implement a custom file copy mechanism for the saved data set to manually copy across nonpaired regions and different storage accounts.
Azure Cache for Redis
Azure Cache for Redis provide two distinct cross-region replication options that are active geo-replication and passive geo-replication. In both cases, there's no explicit dependency on region pairs.
Azure Container Registry
Geo-replication enables an Azure container registry to function as a single registry, serving multiple regions with multi-primary regional registries. There's no restrictions dictated by region pairs for this feature. For more information, see Geo-replication in Azure Container Registry.
Azure Cosmos DB
If your solution requires continuous uptime during region outages, you can configure Azure Cosmos DB to replicate your data across multiple regions and to transparently fail over to operating regions when required. Azure Cosmos DB supports multi-region writes and can distribute your data globally to provide low-latency access to your data from any region without any pairing restriction.
Azure Database for MySQL
Choose any Azure Database for MySQL available Azure regions to spin up your read replicas.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL
For geo-replication in nonpaired regions with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, you can use:
Managed service with geo-replication: Azure PostgreSQL Managed service supports active geo-replication to create a continuously readable secondary replica of your primary server. The readable secondary might be in the same Azure region as the primary or, more commonly, in a different region. This kind of readable secondary replica is also known as geo-replica.
You can also utilize any of the two customer-managed data migration methods listed to replicate the data to a nonpaired region.
Azure Data Factory
For geo-replication in nonpaired regions, Azure Data Factory (ADF) supports Infrastructure-as-code provisioning of ADF pipelines combined with Source Control for ADF.
Azure Event Grid
For geo-replication of Event Grid topics in nonpaired regions, you can implement client-side failover.
Azure IoT Hub
For geo-replication in nonpaired regions, use the concierge pattern for routing to a secondary IoT Hub.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Azure Backup can provide protection for AKS clusters, including a cross-region restore (CRR) feature that's currently in preview and only supports Azure Disks. Although the CRR feature relies on GRS paired regions replicas, any dependency on CRR can be avoided if the AKS cluster stores data only in external storage and avoids using "in-cluster" solutions.
Azure Monitor Logs
Log Analytics workspaces in Azure Monitor Logs don't use paired regions. To ensure business continuity and protect against data loss, enable cross-region workspace replication. For more information, see Enhance resilience by replicating your Log Analytics workspace across regions.
Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus can provide regional resiliency, without a dependency on region pairs, by using either Geo Replication or Geo-Disaster Recovery features.
Azure SQL Database
For geo-replication in nonpaired regions with Azure SQL Database, you can use:
Failover group feature that replicates across any combination of Azure regions without any dependency on underlying storage GRS.
Active geo-replication feature to create a continuously synchronized readable secondary database for a primary database. The readable secondary database might be in the same Azure region as the primary or, more commonly, in a different region. This kind of readable secondary database is also known as a geo-secondary or geo-replica.
Azure SQL Managed Instance
For geo-replication in nonpaired regions with Azure SQL Managed Instance, you can use:
- Failover group feature that replicates across any combination of Azure regions without any dependency on underlying storage GRS.
Azure Storage
To achieve geo-replication in nonpaired regions:
For Azure Object Storage:
For blob storage and Azure Data Lake Storage, you can use tools such as AZCopy or Azure Data Factory.
For general-purpose v2 storage accounts and premium block blob accounts, you can use Azure Storage Object Replication.
Note
Object replication isn't supported for Azure Data Lake Storage.
For Azure NetApp Files (ANF), you can replicate to a set of nonstandard pairs besides Azure region pairs. See Azure NetApp Files (ANF) cross-region replication.
For Azure Files:
To copy your files to another storage account in a different region, use tools such as:
For a sample script, see Sync between two Azure file shares for Backup and Disaster Recovery.
To sync between your Azure file share (cloud endpoint), an on-premises Windows file server, and a mounted file share running on a virtual machine in another Azure region (your server endpoint for disaster recovery purposes), use Azure File Sync.
Important
You must disable cloud tiering to ensure that all data is present locally, and provision enough storage on the Azure Virtual Machine to hold the entire dataset. To ensure changes replicate quickly to the secondary region, files should only be accessed and modified on the server endpoint rather than in Azure.
Azure Virtual Machines
To achieve geo-replication in nonpaired regions, Azure Site Recovery service can be sued. Azure Site Recovery is the Disaster Recovery service from Azure that provides business continuity and disaster recovery by replicating workloads from the primary location to the secondary location. The secondary location can be a nonpaired region if supported by Azure Site Recovery.