AZ-305 Question 139
Single answerYour company operates a mission-critical e-commerce platform on Azure SQL Database (Premium tier). They want to ensure automated failover to another region with minimal data loss in the event of a primary region outage. Which high availability solution should you implement to meet these requirements?
- A
Deploy a read scale-out replica in the same region only
- B
Configure Active Geo-Replication with manual failover to a secondary in another region
- C
Implement an Auto-Failover group with a secondary in another Azure region
- D
Migrate Azure SQL Database to Azure Virtual Machines and set up SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
To achieve automatic failover across Azure regions for Azure SQL Database with minimal data loss, the recommended approach is to use Auto-Failover groups. This feature automatically monitors the health of the primary database and initiates failover to a secondary in another region if the primary becomes unavailable. It is designed for global business continuity scenarios and reduces downtime during regional outages. For more information, refer to Microsoft’s documentation on Auto-Failover groups for Azure SQL Database at https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azure-sql/database/auto-failover-group-overview.
- A. Incorrect.
Option 1: Incorrect. A read scale-out replica in the same region helps offload read workloads but does not protect against a regional outage. If the entire region fails, the replica will also be impacted because it resides in the same Azure region.
- B. Incorrect.
Option 2: Incorrect. Active Geo-Replication can create a secondary in another region, but it typically requires manual failover. This can be acceptable in some scenarios, but it does not fulfill the strict requirement for automated failover in the scenario described.
- C. Correct.
Option 3: Correct. Auto-Failover groups for Azure SQL Database allow you to maintain a geo-secondary in another region and automatically fail over with minimal data loss. This aligns directly with the requirement for hands-off failover in case the primary region goes down.
- D. Incorrect.
Option 4: Incorrect. Migrating to Azure Virtual Machines with Always On Failover Cluster Instances does provide high availability, but it requires more complex management and does not offer automatic cross-region failover out of the box. You would need additional configuration and resources, which is not the most straightforward approach for a fully cloud-based solution using Azure SQL Database.