A global e-commerce company operates its primary web application from a single Azure region and experiences occasional regional outages that impact availability. The company needs to implement a solution that ensures continuous availability of its web application across multiple Azure regions, with automatic failover in case of a regional outage. The solution must also provide global traffic distribution and low-latency access for users worldwide. Which combination of Azure services should be used?
- AAzure Front Door and Azure SQL Database Active Geo-replication
- BAzure Application Gateway and Azure Cosmos DB Multi-Region Writes
- CAzure Load Balancer and Azure Blob Storage GRS
- DAzure Traffic Manager and Azure Site Recovery
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Azure Front Door and Azure SQL Database Active Geo-replication
Azure Front Door provides global traffic distribution, WAF capabilities, and automatic failover at the application layer across regions, ensuring continuous availability and low latency. Azure SQL Database Active Geo-replication provides readable secondary databases in different regions with automatic asynchronous replication, allowing the application to failover its database component.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Azure Application Gateway is regional, and Cosmos DB Multi-Region Writes are for a NoSQL database, not SQL, and don't cover the web application's global distribution and failover requirements directly for a SQL backend.
- C. Azure Load Balancer is regional, not global, and GRS is for storage redundancy, not application-level failover or global traffic distribution.
- D. Azure Traffic Manager provides DNS-based global traffic distribution, but Azure Site Recovery is for VM-level DR, not specifically for web application HA with database replication.
Azure Front Door + SQL DB Active Geo-replication
A powerful combination for global, highly available web applications: Front Door for global traffic management and application-level failover, and Active Geo-replication for cross-region, readable database replicas.
- Front Door provides global load balancing, WAF, and application acceleration.
- Active Geo-replication enables up to 4 readable secondaries for SQL DB.
- Together, they offer a robust multi-region HA/DR solution for web apps with SQL backends.
Memory trick: Front Door opens the way globally, while SQL Geo-replication mirrors your data everywhere.