Azure Storage Account Failover is Now Generally Available

One of the major benefits of cloud computing is elasticity. A major part of being elastic is being agnostic to the location. Azure just added a new feature to help you stay operational and keep writing new data, to a secondary endpoint of geo-replicated storage.

Previously: In case a client used a geo-redundant storage account, he would not be able to write to the secondary region, unless Microsoft initiated a regional failover (indicates an extreme circumstance).

Now: The client can use the new feature of Azure Storage account- Customer-initiated Storage account failover, which updates the secondary endpoint to become the primary endpoint for his storage account, without any code change required. Once the failover is complete, the client can begin writing to the new primary endpoint.

Keep in mind, after the failover is complete, the storage account is configured to be locally redundant in the new primary endpoint. To resume replication to the new secondary (which used to be the primary), you will need to configure the account for geo-redundancy again. Note that this action carries a cost.

A customer initiates the account failover to the secondary endpoint (Picture source: Microsoft)

NOTE: An account failover usually involves some data loss. It’s important to understand the implications of initiating an account failover.

For more information check out Azure documentation.

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