>> On this episode,
Emily Lisa tunes in to tell us more about Availability Zones.
Be sure to listen to this episode of Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman.
Welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
The goal of the high availability architecture for
Azure SQL Database is to make sure
you're up and running as much as possible.
Today, I'm joined with me, Emily Lisa,
who is a program manager on the Azure SQL team.
Thanks for joining me, Emily.
>> Hi, Anna, thanks for having me on the show.
>> Of course, and today Emily is going to be
telling us a little bit more about Availability Zone.
So Emily, can you start by just telling
us what is an Availability Zone?
>> Yes. So in Azure,
an Availability Zone is
a completely separate area within a region.
So within an Availability Zone enabled region,
there is a minimum three different Availability Zones.
Each of these Availability Zones has
completely separate power, cooling, and networking,
allowing for if there's any issue in one Availability Zone for
this to be not affected in
the other Availability Zones within the same region.
>> So this is an Azure all up thing,
but how does it really relate to Azure SQL?
>> So for Azure SQL,
we have something called the zone redundant configuration.
This is available in the premium and business critical
service tiers at no additional cost for the customer.
What this is, is
your 2-3 secondary replicas that you already have for
your premium and business critical databases are spread
across the three different Availability Zones within that region.
So what this guarantees is that if there is
a datacenter outage or a zonal level outage,
this protects your database from not
being available within those larger span of outages.
>> When we talk about zones,
are these zones within the same region,
and are they available in all regions?
>> Yes. These zones are within the same region.
It's not available for all regions yet,
but we're working to expand to cover more regions.
Currently, it is available for Azure SQL in Central US, East US,
East US 2, UK South, West Europe,
France Central, Japan East,
Southeast Asia, and Australia East.
We're also in preview for West US 2, and North Europe.
In our public documentation about Availability Zones,
we will update that regularly for each of
the Azure services as this becomes available in more regions.
>> So I can always go check that and we'll put the link to that in
the description so people can go and check
and see if it's available in their region?
>> Yes.
>> Awesome. Then how do I go about setting this up,
if I want to enable a zone redundant configuration on my database?
>> Yes, so this is actually really straightforward process.
This can be done in ARM PowerShell or in portal.
I'm going to show it in portal.
So if you go to "Configure" for your database,
all you have to do is click "Yes" for "Would
you like to make this database zone redundant?",
and then "Apply", and then
that's how you switch to the zone redundant configuration.
This can be done for databases or elastic pools,
this can be done for
either new databases and
elastic pools or for already existing ones.
>> Cool, it seems pretty easy to set up.
>> Yeah, it's just one click
and you have that additional high availability value.
>> Sweet, so where else can I go,
where else should I check to learn more about how
this affects the SLA or other things?
>> Yes. So if you go to our SLA page,
which we'll provide a link for that in the description.
You can see that for a premium or business critical database,
where the zone redundant configuration is not enabled,
our SLA is 99.99 percent.
So what this translates to in maximum minutes of
downtime is 52.56 minutes of downtime per year.
By comparison, if you look at
the for premium business databases
where the zone redundant configuration is enabled,
its 99.995 percent, which is translates to
a downtime that will not exceed
26.28 minutes of downtime per year.
So by enabling the zone redundant configuration,
the database will have
a 50 percent reduction in downtime throughout a year.
So this additional high availability benefit is offered
at no additional cost and is pretty easy to set up for customers.
>> Awesome. Thanks, Emily,
this was really interesting, really useful.
Seems like the way to go if we want
the highest availability solution in the industry.
So thanks for coming on our show today,
and if you like this video,
please like the video.
Subscribe to our channel and leave us a comment.
Thanks and see you next time on Data Exposed.
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