DEV Community

Nirmal kumar
Nirmal kumar

Posted on

Amazing Azure's data redundancy strategies

I felt that there are no simple depiction of how Azure's data redundancy strategies work which made me to write this.

Data center is a place where Microsoft is having a bulk of servers with it's own dedicated electricity, network, cooling system, security, etc., in a single physical location like how we see in Mission Impossible movies where everyone will try to insert a chip to hack the servers. But in reality, it is almost impossible because of dedicated high level security measures to protect our data by none other than Microsoft.

Microsoft groups it's data center using these terms
i) Region
ii) Availability Zone
iii) Geography

One or more data centers groups together and called Azure Region.
3 data centers in a region form an Azure availability zone.
Two or more Azure region groups together and called Azure Geography.

Now we are good with basic terms. Let's see about data redundancy. What is it ? what is the need ?
Well! Did you ever think of what are you gonna do if your mobile fell into water ? How are you going to backup or restore the data in that crashed mobile ? What if you have an another place where your mobile syncs all your data everytime whatever you make changes in your mobile. That is data redundancy. Whatever you save to Azure to a storage account based on the redundancy option you selected it copies or make similar copy of same data in other place as backup so that in case of a disaster our data is always safe in Azure and can be easily recovered.

There are 6 redundancy options available in Azure.

a. Local redundant storage (LRS)
b. Zone redundant storage (ZRS)
c. Geo redundant storage (GRS)
d. Geo Zone redundant storage (GZRS)
e. Read Access Geo redundant storage (RA-GRS)
f. Read access Geo zone redundant storage (RA-GZRS)

Local redundant storage:

Alt Text

Zone redundant storage:

Alt Text

Geo redundant storage (GRS):

Alt Text

Geo Zone redundant storage (GZRS):

Alt Text

Read Access Geo redundant storage (RA-GRS):

Alt Text

Read access Geo zone redundant storage (RA-GZRS):

Alt Text

Top comments (0)