Backup and disaster recovery for Microsoft Azure applications
Tags: webdev, azure, cloud, javascript
Published: 2023-04-03 21:56:36

## Introduction:
We are honest about the likelihood that there will be issues with the cloud. The goal is to decrease the effects of a single malfunctioning component, not to fully preclude failures. Testing is a tactic to lessen these effects. Automate testing of your applications wherever you can but be prepared for setbacks. In the event of a disaster, having backup and recovery procedures is essential.
Depending on your company's demands and the program, you can only tolerate a certain level of operation following a disaster. It might be acceptable for some programs to have intermittent availability, limited functionality, or delayed processing. It is unacceptable if other programs’ functionality suffers in any way.

## Principals of disaster recovery
Develop and test a disaster recovery plan on a regular basis using significant failure scenarios.
Make a disaster recovery strategy that enables most applications to function with limited capabilities.
Make a backup strategy that is unique to the application's circumstances and operational requirements.
Automate the failback and failover processes.
The failover and failback strategy must be successfully tested and validated at least once.

## Approach for Emergency Recovery
Plan for rehabilitation first. The plan is deemed complete once it has passed extensive testing. Include the people, processes, and software required to resume functioning in the service-level agreement (SLA) you've established for your clients.
Consider the following suggestions as you create and evaluate your disaster recovery plan:
Include the process for raising issues and getting assistance. This information can help you prevent a protracted outage as you learn how to use the recovery technique for the first time.
Examine the impact on the business of application failures.
Choose a cross-region recovery architecture for mission-critical applications.
Select a specific individual to oversee the disaster recovery plan's automation and testing.
Take note of each movement, especially any manual ones.
Automation as
To carry out the plan, train the operations team.
Simulate disasters on a frequent basis to verify and enhance the plan.
If you're using Azure Site Recovery to replicate virtual machines, develop a fully automated recovery strategy that fails over the entire application (VMs).

## Testing for Operational readiness
Check the system's operational readiness for failover to the secondary region and failback to the primary region. Many Azure services provide manual failover or test failover for disaster recovery drills. Alternately, you may disable or uninstall Azure services to simulate an outage.
Automated operational responses should go through periodic testing as part of the regular application lifecycle to achieve operational efficacy.

## Testing for failover and failback
Test failover and failback to make sure that your application's dependent services restart simultaneously during disaster recovery. Changes to systems and processes may have an impact on failover and failback functions, but these effects might not be apparent until the primary system fails or becomes overloaded. Test your failover skills before applying them to a real-world problem. Make sure that the failback and failover of the dependent services take place in the correct order as well.
If you use Azure Site Recovery to replicate your virtual machines, run disaster recovery tests periodically to validate your replication strategy. A test failover has no impact on the ongoing VM replication or your production system.
## An outage of a dependable service
You should understand how a service outage will affect each dependent service and how the application will respond to it. Because so many service providers offer features that aid in resiliency and availability, evaluating each service independently is likely to boost your disaster recovery plan. For instance, Azure Event Hubs supports failure over to the secondary namespace.

## Network Failure
When parts of the Azure network are down, you might not be able to access your application or data. In this situation, we suggest designing the disaster recovery strategy so that most apps can only operate partially.
If decreasing functionality is not an option, the only other choices are application shutdown or failover to a different location.
If an Azure network outage stops your application from accessing its data, you can run locally with fewer features by using cached data.
Until connectivity is established, you can store data elsewhere.
## Automated recovery
The steps required to restore or failover the application to a secondary Azure region should be codified, preferably in an automated form, to ensure that there are capabilities to respond to an outage effectively and with the least disruption. Similar codified procedures should exist to capture the process needed to fail back the application to the primary region once a failover triggering problem has been fixed.
Make that the failover plan for automating failover operations takes into account the tooling used for orchestrating the failover. You will encounter difficulties carrying out your failover, for example, if Jenkins is running on a virtual machine that is impacted by the outage. Region-specific projects are also available for Azure DevOps.

## Alternative strategy Azure Applications
There are alternative ways to implement distributed computing across geographical boundaries. These strategies need to be tailored to the particular company circumstances and application settings. On a broad scale, the following categories could be used to classify the techniques:
• During an emergency, the application is redeployed using this technique from scratch. Redeploying applications from scratch is the best option for non-mission-critical applications that don't require a guaranteed recovery time.
• Install roles after creating a backup hosted service in a different location to guarantee a minimum capacity. (Active/Passive) Warm Spare. However, there is no production traffic for the parts. This approach can be advantageous for applications that are not designed to distribute traffic between regions.
• Active/Active Hot Spare: The software is designed to lift the strain of manufacturing from several places. Cloud services in each location might be configured with greater capacity than is required for disaster recovery. Instead, the cloud services may scale out as necessary during a crisis and failover. 

## Prepare for localized failures.
Azure is divided into regions both conceptually and physically. Several closely placed data centers make comprise a region. Numerous locations and services offer availability zones, which can be used to boost resilience against outages in a single data center. Consider using regions with availability zones to boost the availability of your solution.
Occasionally, for instance, because of network disruptions, it is possible for all the facilities within a region or availability zone to become inaccessible. Or, for instance, a natural disaster can cause all facilities to be completely lost. Azure may be used to construct applications that are deployed across zones and regions. The risk that a failure may occur in one location or zone is reduced by this dispersion.