Business continuity in the cloud – DR in Azure and AWS

 

Data Recovery – point-in-time restore

Capability	Basic tier	Standard tier	Premium tier
Point in Time Restore from backup	Any restore point within 7 days	Any restore point within 35 days	Any restore point within 35 days
Geo-Restore from geo-replicated backups	ERT < 12h, RPO < 1h	ERT < 12h, RPO < 1h	ERT < 12h, RPO < 1h
Active Geo-Replication	ERT < 30s, RPO < 5s	ERT < 30s, RPO < 5s	ERT < 30s, RPO < 5s

 

Geo Restore versus GEO Replication

If your application processes low volumes of data with a low rate of updates and the Basic tier provides the appropriate performance level then geo-restore should meet its recovery needs. For higher data volumes, you need active replication – called Geo Replication.

These are both SQL Server features – and are not specific to any Cloud Offering. Which means that Geo Restore and Geo Replication are available in AWS RDS as well as SQL Azure.

Azure Traffic Manager

The policy options are round-robin, performance, or failover. For the sake of this article, we will be concerned with only the failover option.

Azure Redis Cache

provides caching to your application from within your cloud service deployment, which provides disaster recovery benefits.