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azureredundancy

Minimize downtime (Azure Website + SQL DB)

My Azure websites are down a lot, four outages (30 minutes - 3 hours) in the past 30 days. I only use one small standard website and one web SQL DB in US West so I can't expect 99.5%. This week (a few days ago and currently), 503 errors were / are the problem, but I also experienced substantial DB downtimes at other occasions.

My question is: what can I do (with hopefully not too much additional costs and effort) to raise stability? Which measures did other Azure users try? Would this have prevented the 3 hour downtime last Monday?

Solution

  • There are (at least) three things you can do:

    1. Scale your website so that you have 2 instances running (How to Scale Websites);
    2. Deploy a another copy of the website in a different region, and use traffic manager to Load Balance them (Traffic Manager Overview)
    3. Create another instance of the database, and sync them (Getting Started with Azure SQL Data Sync)