Fundamental
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Fundamental
Prepare and test your skills
Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage With Secondary Reads
Free sample question, answered and explained below. The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam practice bank has 688 more like it. Try 10 free: instant score, no account.
An organization hosts mission-critical business reports in an Azure Storage account. The organization requires protection against regional disasters by copying data asynchronously to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away.
In addition, client applications distributed globally need immediate, continuous read access to the data in the secondary region at all times, without waiting for or initiating an account failover.
Which Azure Storage redundancy option should the organization select?
Explanations
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
What Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Is
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) is an Azure Storage redundancy option that provides cross-region replication while exposing a dedicated secondary endpoint for read access. Like standard Geo-redundant storage (GRS), RA-GRS synchronously writes data three times within a single physical location in the primary region using Locally-redundant storage (LRS), and then asynchronously replicates that data to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away.
How It Meets the Requirements
- Regional disaster recovery: RA-GRS provides multi-region durability by replicating data to a distant geographic region, guarding against full regional outages or catastrophic events.
- Continuous read access in secondary region: RA-GRS provides a dedicated secondary read-only endpoint (e.g.,
https://-secondary.blob.core.windows.net), allowing client applications to read data directly from the secondary replica without needing an administrative or automated failover.
Key Advantages and Capabilities
- High data durability: Offers at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) of data durability over a given year.
- Independent read endpoint: Applications can balance read traffic or serve local users near the secondary region with lower read latencies.
- Disaster resilience: Protects against regional downtime without losing access to existing data copies.
- Seamless failover capability: Supports customer-managed account failover if the primary region experiences sustained downtime.
Why This Is Optimal
RA-GRS perfectly addresses both constraints: it delivers geographic replication for business continuity and grants direct read access to secondary region replicas during normal, healthy operations.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
What Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) Is
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates data synchronously three times within a primary region using Locally-redundant storage (LRS) and then copies the data asynchronously to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away to protect against regional outages.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
While GRS copies data to a secondary region for disaster recovery, it does not provide read access to the secondary region while the primary region is functioning normally. In standard GRS, data in the secondary region remains completely inaccessible to client applications until an account failover is initiated.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- No secondary endpoint: Standard GRS does not provide a secondary read endpoint for client traffic.
- Failover dependency: Access to the secondary replica is only unlocked if a customer-initiated or Microsoft-initiated failover takes place.
- Asynchronous replication lag: Data replication to the secondary region occurs asynchronously, meaning pending writes might be lost during an emergency failover.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization only required disaster recovery replication across regions at a lower cost and had no requirement for applications to read data from the secondary region during normal operations.
Locally-redundant storage (LRS)
Locally-redundant storage (LRS)
What Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS) Is
Locally-redundant storage (LRS) is the entry-level redundancy option in Azure Storage. It synchronously replicates data three times within a single physical data center in the primary region.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
LRS does not replicate data across multiple availability zones or across geographical regions. If a data center or regional disaster occurs, data stored in LRS could become temporarily unavailable or permanently lost. Furthermore, it offers no secondary region endpoints for read access.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Single data center scope: Data is confined to a single storage scale unit within one physical facility.
- Lowest cost: Provides the most economical redundancy configuration for non-critical workloads.
- No regional failover: Does not support secondary endpoints or cross-region disaster recovery protection.
- 11 nines of durability: Delivers at least 99.999999999% durability over a specified year.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization needed the lowest-cost storage configuration for dev/test workloads and did not require protection against data center or regional failures.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
What Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) Is
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) synchronously replicates data across three separate Azure availability zones within the same primary region. Each availability zone is an isolated physical location with independent power, cooling, and networking.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
ZRS protects against the failure of an individual data center or zone, but it does not protect against a catastrophic failure that impacts the entire geographic region. Additionally, ZRS does not replicate data to a secondary paired region, nor does it provide a secondary geographic read endpoint.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Intra-region resiliency: Tolerates individual availability zone outages within a single region without downtime.
- Synchronous replication: Ensures zero data loss across availability zones under normal operations.
- No cross-region presence: Lacks replication to secondary paired regions located hundreds of miles away.
- 12 nines of durability: Offers at least 99.9999999999% data durability across zones.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization wanted high availability across availability zones within a single primary region without requiring secondary region replication or geo-disaster recovery.
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