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Difficulty: MediumDesign Relational Database HA and DR

A software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider has a customer billing application that runs on a single database in Azure SQL Database. The database is deployed in the East US region. You need to design a disaster recovery solution that meets the following requirements:
- In the event of a regional outage, the database must support automatic failover to the West US region with a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour.
- The application must use a constant read-write endpoint that does not require updating connection strings when a failover occurs.
- Read-only billing reports must be offloaded to the secondary region database replica.
- Administrative intervention during failover must be minimized.

Which database configuration should you select?

  1. A
    Configure geo-replication to the West US region, and deploy an Azure Application Gateway to manage database connection redirection during a failover.
  2. B
    Migrate the database to SQL Server on an Azure Virtual Machine, configure database mirroring, and use Standard HDD storage for the transaction log files to reduce costs.
  3. Create an auto-failover group that includes the database, and configure the application to connect to the read-write and read-only listener endpoints.Answer
  4. D
    Set up geo-replication to the West US region, and configure an Azure Traffic Manager profile to route database connection traffic to the active database replica.

Answer

Create an auto-failover group that includes the database, and configure the application to connect to the read-write and read-only listener endpoints.
Creating an auto-failover group is correct because it manages replication and failover of Azure SQL databases to a secondary region automatically. It provides read-write and read-only DNS listener endpoints that remain constant, allowing the application to use a single connection string without modification during a failover event, while offloading reporting workloads to the secondary replica.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the business requirements for database recovery, noting the need for automatic failover to a secondary region, a constant connection string, read-scale routing, and minimal administrative effort.
The requirements point to a managed Azure SQL Database disaster recovery solution rather than an IaaS migration, which would increase management overhead.
This rules out IaaS configurations (SQL Server on Azure VMs) as they do not align with the minimal administrative intervention goal.
2
Evaluate Azure SQL Database high availability and disaster recovery options, comparing active geo-replication and auto-failover groups.
Active geo-replication requires manual intervention to fail over and does not provide unified connection string listeners, whereas auto-failover groups automate failover and expose read-write and read-only listener endpoints.
This satisfies the automatic failover, unchanging connection string, and read-scale requirements.
3
Identify the correct configuration that combines auto-failover groups with the single database setup.
An auto-failover group is configured with the primary database server and a secondary server in the target region, containing the customer billing database.
This achieves the desired HA/DR architecture with zero application-side connection string changes during a failover.

Key Concept

Azure SQL Database Auto-Failover Groups provide automatic regional failover and listener endpoints for transparent connection redirection and read-scale routing.
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Topics

Design Relational Database HA and DR

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