An energy grid utility company deploys its core telemetry monitoring application to an Azure SQL Managed Instance in the East US region. To design a disaster recovery solution in the West US region, you must satisfy the following requirements:
- The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) must be less than 30 minutes.
- The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 15 minutes.
- Client applications must automatically reconnect after a failover without requiring connection string modifications.
- Read-heavy reporting workloads must be offloaded to the secondary region to avoid impacting primary write operations.
Which two configurations should you include in the design to meet these requirements?
- Create an auto-failover group containing the primary and secondary SQL Managed Instances.Answer
- Configure the reporting applications to connect using the read-only listener endpoint of the auto-failover group.Answer
- CConfigure active geo-replication at the database level between the primary and secondary instances.
- DDeploy SQL Server on Azure virtual machines using Standard SSD storage and configure Always On availability groups.
Answer
To meet the requirements, you should create an auto-failover group containing the primary and secondary SQL Managed Instances, and configure reporting applications to connect using the read-only listener endpoint of the auto-failover group.
Creating an auto-failover group provides the replication and traffic routing mechanism required for Azure SQL Managed Instance. It generates a read-write listener for primary write operations and a read-only listener to offload query workloads to the secondary instance in the West US region. This setup satisfies both RTO and RPO requirements and avoids application configuration changes upon failover.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Azure SQL Managed Instance supports high availability and disaster recovery across regions using auto-failover groups, which provide separate read-write and read-only listener endpoints for seamless client redirection.