Architecting Multi-Region Solutions with Azure

Today, in the rapidly globalized world of business businesses no longer operate only locally. With customers, partners and employees spread across the planet, this is driven need for reliable resilient high performance applications that can seamlessly work in many regions. Microsoft Azure - Leader in Cloud Computing offers the most comprehensive set of tools and services for building multi-region architecture. In this blog, we first walk you through the factors that one should keep in mind for architecting a multi-region solution using Azure.

Why Multi-Region Architectures Are a Big Deal

Why we need a multi-region architecture

High Availability: your application is available even if one region loses power.

Disaster Recovery: Backup plan in the event of catastrophic failures at a primary region.

Performance improvement: It reduces latency by having your application closer to the users.

Compliance: Stores the data in specific regions to fulfill hardware commitments.

Important Azure services for Multi-region Architectures

Azure Traffic Manager

A DNS-based traffic load balancer that allows you to spread incoming requests across multiple regions Azure Traffic Manager ensures high availability and optimal performance by routing users requests to an appropriate endpoint based on the configured method of routing (eg: Priority, Weighted, Performance, Geographic)

Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door is the entry point named Azure scalable and secure in delivery of your global applications. It supports application layer (Layer 7) routing and has SSL termination, caching, as well as integration with WAF( Web Application Firewall), this makes it perfect for multi-region applications.

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Azure Site Recovery orchestrates and automates the replication of virtual machines to keep your business-critical applications available in case a site goes down. It provides the ability to failover and fallback across regions making it a mandatory part of any disaster recovery plan.

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB provides a globally distributed, multi-model database service that offers turnkey global distribution. Cosmos DB enables low-latency data access and high availability across regions with features such as multi-region writes and comprehensive SLAs.

Multi-Region Solution Architecture Guidelines

Design for Failure

Expect failures, and work to create a fault-tolerant architecture. Re-reroute traffic using Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Front Door, Enable redundancy & Get disaster recovery with azure site recovery.

Replication and Consistency

A main concern when dealing with multi-region architectures. Azure Cosmos DB offers multiple consistency models as relaxed (e.g., Eventual), strong, bounded staleness or session and more Recently added consistent prefix to address various application needs. Select the model that best balances consistency with performance for your application.

Automate Everything

Complex multi-region architectures are made easier to manage with automation at scale. Automate deployment, scaling, failover processes using ARM Templates and Azure DevOps with a help of Azure Automation This helps lowers the chance of human error and obtains operating consistency between regions.

Monitor and Optimize

Keeping your multi-region application healthy and performant requires continuous monitoring and optimization. Leverage Azure Monitor/Log Analytics and Application Insights to monitor your application, get insights from performance, detect incidents of failure or bugs that are occurring in the environment and adopt a new architecture based on transparent data.

Real-world usage

Scenario Contoso Ltd., a worldwide e-commerce company is using Azure to have their multi region solution. Contoso Ltd. only utilised the Azure Traffic Manager for traffic distribution however, if they used both the Azure Front Door as well then bad requests and exceeding timeout would be avoided that lead to a negative user experience by minimising the response time which reduced latency with 99.9% uptime based on their service-level rate provide. On top of that, Azure Site Recovery made sure the Contoso remained functional throughout regional outages.

Conclusion

In Virtually available geo locations, building scalable and reliable globally distributed solutions are foundations for businesses seeking high availability, disaster recovery,and performance. Leveraging the comprehensive Azure services portfolio, and utilizing design practices typically employed on these platforms you can build resilient, high performance applications that will accommodate a global application user base.