AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam

Venture into the world of Azure Infrastructure, where design meets functionality. Harness your skills and gain mastery over complex cloud structures to ace the AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam!

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Recommend a backup and recovery solution for databases

Architecting Resilient Database Backup and Restore Strategies

In designing resilient backup and restore strategies for databases on Azure, it is crucial to understand various backup and recovery solutions available for relational and NoSQL databases. This ensures robust business continuity by meeting the organization’s compliance requirements and recovery objectives.

Types of Backups

Azure supports different types of backups:

  • Full Database Backups: Typically done weekly.
  • Differential Backups: Usually performed every 12 to 24 hours.
  • Transaction Log Backups: Executed every 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the computational size and activity of the database.

Full database backups create a complete copy of your entire database. Differential backups save all changes made since the last full backup, speeding up recovery times. Transaction log backups capture all database transactions since the last backup, enabling point-in-time recovery.

Storage Redundancy

Backup storage redundancy is essential for data protection against hardware failures, power outages, or natural disasters. Azure provides several redundancy options:

  • Locally Redundant Storage (LRS): Stores three copies of your data locally.
  • Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS): Distributes data across multiple zones within an Azure region.
  • Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS): Replicates data to a secondary region for enhanced durability, allowing you to restore if the primary region fails. Default for many services.

Each redundancy option offers different levels of protection, with Geo-Redundant Storage being the most comprehensive, providing data replication across regions for high availability and disaster recovery.

Backup Management and Compliance

Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance provide automated backup solutions supporting long-term retention and geo-redundant storage, which ensures compliance with organizational requirements. All data in these backups is encrypted using strong encryption methods.

Azure Database for MySQL supports automatic server backups across user-configured LRS or GRS with an adjustable retention period between 7 and 35 days. These backups are encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption, ensuring secure recovery processes.

Both platforms facilitate compliance adherence by providing encrypted backups and long-term storage options to meet various regulatory needs.

Configuring Recovery Services Vault

A Recovery Services Vault is crucial for managing backups. Follow these steps to create one:

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. Navigate to the Business Continuity Center dashboard.
  3. Create a new vault, ensuring it’s in the same region as the data source.

Creating a Recovery Services Vault centralizes your backup management, integrating multiple backup services into a single location for simplified monitoring and configuration.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

High availability ensures minimal disruption through redundant, fault-tolerant, or failover-protected components. For SAP applications, this includes techniques like distributing application servers across multiple Azure VMs and subnets to achieve redundancy, avoiding single points of failure.

In Azure Data Explorer, high availability involves a fault-tolerant persistence layer with default LRS, optional ZRS for zone failover, and high-availability configurations at the compute layer. Disaster recovery practices include enabling delete locks, undo commands for recoverability, and using snapshots for protection against accidental deletions.

Cross Region Restore

Enabling Cross Region Restore in a Recovery Services Vault ensures data can be restored in a secondary region, meeting compliance requirements and ensuring data availability during a regional disaster. Recommended for services with GRS storage configurations, it provides a secondary RPO, maintaining recovery points replicated to the secondary paired region within 12 hours.

Cross Region Restore maximizes data resilience by ensuring backup replicates accurately between primary and secondary regions, offering comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities.

Conclusion

Understanding and employing different Azure-native backup and recovery solutions—along with leveraging storage redundancy, automated backups, high availability configurations, and cross-region restore capabilities—ensures your database systems are resilient against disruptions while meeting both RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) and RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) defined by your organization.