Disaster Recovery in Azure

Disaster recovery (DR) is a very interesting topic when it comes to Azure. Let me start off by answering a common question. Yes, you need DR in Azure! If you take one thing from this chapter, it is this. I often hear companies say the VM (note the singular here so they also don’t even have high availability configured) is deployed in the cloud, so it already has DR. This is not correct. If they deploy two VMs and remember to use availability sets or availability zones, they have HA but still don’t have DR. They may learn this fact in a very painful way if there is a rare region-level incident and their service goes dark and a lot of uncomfortable discussions commence.

This is important to understand, and it applies to both IaaS and PaaS. Your deployments are to a region. Very rarely, even for PaaS, are deployments across regions. This does not mean there are not technologies to help deploy to multiple regions, to balance between them, or to set...