Business Continuity in the Windows Azure Cloud

1. AZR203 Business Continuity in the Windows Azure Cloud Yousef A. Khalidi Distinguished Engineer Microsoft Corporation

2. Session Objectives and Takeaways • Session Objectives: • Understand business continuity support provided by Windows Azure • Learn methods to maintain application availability • Key Takeaways: • Windows Azure provides highly-available and geo-distributed infrastructure • You have to architect your app for high availability • Your SLA requirements and budget constraints will dictate the solution

3. Cloud + Business Continuity Some things change New trust relationships Plan for failure at multiple levels Design to operate seamlessly through failures A new option for the disaster recovery site And some remain the same Your business goals Your availability and recovery objectives What can you expect from the platform? How can you make your application highly available?

4. The Big Picture Application Architecture Design your application to meet your availability goals Platform Services Optional availability services your applications can leverage Platform Preparedness Preventing and recovering from outages

5. What We Do to Protect the Platform

6. Windows Azure World-Class By Design Platform Availability and Security Physical Features Geo-Distribution Complianceand DR Physical facilities have broad compliance certifications Service-level compliance on near-term roadmap Preparedness, testing, refinement Multiple data centers in different geographies Local and geo-replication Redundant platform services and failover 99.9% uptime, financially-backed SLAs Highly available platform services Service isolation over virtualized compute and network Clear boundaries and multiple lines of defense State-of-the-art security and access control World-class data centers - redundant power, climate control, and fire prevention and suppression Leading innovator in power efficiency Multi $billion cloud infrastructure

7. Highly Available Infrastructure • Redundancy • Duplicate copies of all data • No single point of failure platform services • Redundant network switches, routers, etc. • Partitioning • Many separate compute and storage stamps • Separate fabric controller and related services for each stamp • Optimized for MTTR • Expect and recover from failures quickly

8. Windows Azure Global Presence North America Region Europe Region Asia Pacific Region West – U.S. Sub-Region East – U.S. Sub-Region N. Europe Sub-Region W. Europe Sub-Region N. Central – U.S. Sub-Region E. AsiaSub-Region S. Central – U.S. Sub-Region S.E. Asia Sub-Region Major datacenter CDN node

9. Platform-Level DR Preparedness On-going investment in disaster preparedness Platform meta state Stored in storage system Frequently check-pointed, backed-up and geo replicated Testing, simulations and process refinements Capacity management Extra capacity reserved in each datacenter for DR purposes “N+1” model for failover

10. Platform Services You Can Leverage

11. Platform Services A set of building blocks BLOB and Table Geo-replication SQL Azure DB Copy Application Health Management Traffic Manager CTP

12. WA Storage Geo-Replication North Central US South Central US • Data geo-replicated across data centers hundreds of miles apart • Turned on right now for Blob and Table data • Provides data durability in face of major data center disasters • Data geo-replicated within regions only • User chooses primary location during account creation • Other datacenter in region is the secondary location • Asynchronous geo-replication • Off critical path of live requests North Europe West Europe East Asia South East Asia Geo-replication

13. WA Geo-Failover Updating IP Address • Existing URL works after failover • Failover Trigger – failover would only be used if primary could not be recovered • Asynchronous Geo-replication – may lose recent updates during failover • Typically geo-replicate data within minutes Azure DNS Failover South Central US NorthCentral US Geo-replication

14. Location of Customer Data Customers may specify the geographic region in which their Data will be stored • Asia: East and Southeast • Europe: North and West • United States: North Central, South Central,East, West • Microsoft will not transfer Customer Data outside the major geographic region(s) customer specifies (for example, from Europe to U.S. or from U.S. to Asia) except: • Where the customer configures the account to enable this, e.g., through use of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) feature • Where necessary for Microsoft to provide customer support, to troubleshoot the service, or comply with legal requirements • Microsoft does not control or limit the regions from which customers or their end users may access Customer Data Microsoft may transfer Customer Data within a major geographic region (e.g., within Europe) for data redundancy or other purposes

15. SQL Data Sync • Goals of Data Sync • Synchronization of data between SQL Server databases and SQL Azure databases • Synchronization of data between two or more SQL Azure databases • Challenges • Preservation of transaction boundaries • Some schemas are not supported • No support for multiple versions Sync SQL Azure

16. SQL Azure HA Recommendations • Enable resiliency by app re-try logic • Enable point in time recovery by maintaining several snapshots • Convert to BACPAC and blobs to minimize storage cost • Enable geo-redundancy by exporting BACPAC(s) into multiple datacenters • Consider using blob geo-replication to minimize storage and bandwidth cost

17. Roadmap: Evolution of HA in SQL Azure User initiated geo-replication Automatic replication and synchronization Optional RPO enforcement Read-only geo-secondary Multiple geo-secondaries User-controlled termination for failover

18. Roadmap: Point in time recovery Backup to attached storage P Highly available S Restore to new database S Any point in time within retention period P

19. Windows Azure Traffic ManagerLoad balance user traffic across hosted services running in same or different datacenters to build globally available, high performing apps DNS based traffic management based on policies: Performance, Round- robin, Failover www.foo.com CNAME • Load-balancing • Endpoint monitoring foo.trafficmgr.cloudapp.net Improve app performance by serving user requests with services ‘closest’ to them Policies Improve app availability by automatically failing over when a service goes down Hosted Service Hosted Service Hosted Service

20. Architecting Your App for High Availability

21. Application Design Best Practices Deploy to multiple regions Route traffic intelligently with Traffic Manager Synchronize data Specify locations of compute and storage resources Capacity and app arch considerations “Performance” policy for active-active “Failover” policy for active-passive SQL Azure Backup and Data Sync Other storage (custom-built replication)

22. Consider Your Application Portfolio Mission critical High impact Low impact

23. Application Design Patterns Redeploy on failure Single data center deployment Everything ready for redeploy Capacity as available Active / passive Single data center active Staged in additional data center(s) Reserve capacity, scale as needed Active / active Multiple data centers active Use all of what you reserve Optimize connections for performance Balance Cost Complexity Recovery time Recovery point Reserved capacity Plan it, test it Assets People Procedures Connections Dependencies

24. Ideal Approaches Active/Active Mission critical Active/Passive High impact Redeploy on Failure Low impact

25. Things To Think About What components can be distributed and stateless? Logic that needs to be site/instance-aware Availability objectives versus cost Cold/warm/hot standby Synchronous or asynchronous replication, tolerance for loss

26. Important Considerations Data stored in Windows Azure blobs and tables is automatically replicated to peer data center Can't access remote data until storage failover is complete Microsoft decides when the failover occurs Other data and applications are not replicated and do not automatically failover between data centers Maintain deployments in secondary data center to guarantee capacity

27. Using Windows Azure as a Disaster Recovery Site • Use Windows Azure for data backup • SQL Azure Sync • Backup data to blob store • 3rd party appliances • Run VMs in cloud or on-premises • Periodically back up VHDs in blob storage • Launch VMs in the cloud • Consider application architecture and dependencies • AD, databases, other services

28. Using Windows Azure as Online Backup with Windows Server 2012 Microsoft Online Backup Portal Sign up & Billing Sign up &Billing 3rd Party Cloud Microsoft Online Backup Service 3rd Party Online Backup Service IT Admin or VAP IT Admin or VAP Backup/Restore Backup/Restore Registration Inbox Engine Inbox UI Registration Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012 Backup (Extensible)

29. Comprehensive Compliance Framework Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Industry Standards and Regulations Controls Framework Predictable Audit Schedule Media Ratings Council Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, etc. • Identify and integrate • Regulatory requirements • Customer requirements • Assess and remediate • Eliminate or mitigate gaps in control design • Test effectiveness and assess risk • Attain certifications and attestations • Improve and optimize • Examine root cause of non-compliance • Track until fully remediated ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification Certification and Attestations SSAE 16 attestations

30. More Information: Windows Azure Trust Centerhttp://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/ One location to aggregate content across Security, Privacy, and Compliance

31. Summary • Multi-level failure handling built into Windows Azure platform • Platform provides you building blocks to use in your app • You have to architect your app for high availability • Availability objectives versus cost • Design to operate seamlessly through failures • Windows Azure continues to invest in high availability

32. Related Content • DBI334: Business Continuity Solutions in Microsoft SQL Azure Find Me Later At the TLC

33. Track Resources @WindowsAzure @ms_teched Hands-On Labs Meetwindowsazure.com DOWNLOAD Windows Azure Windowsazure.com/ teched

34. Resources Learning TechNet • Connect. Share. Discuss. • Microsoft Certification & Training Resources http://northamerica.msteched.com www.microsoft.com/learning • Resources for IT Professionals • Resources for Developers • http://microsoft.com/technet http://microsoft.com/msdn

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