Introduction
Microsoft Azure provides high availability and durability to all storage accounts by replicating data stored in a storage account across different locations. This replication is transparent to the user/customers and is always performed. Therefore replication copies the information to different places in Azure’s infrastructure, ensuring that your data is protected against hardware or even datacenter failures.
Types of Replication strategies
There are several types of Replication strategies.
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
The locally redundant storage provides 99.999999999% (11 nines) of the durability of our data. Using this type of strategy, data will be copied inside the same datacenter racks in different fault domains for the purpose of High Availability
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
The Zone-redundant storage strategy is to provide 99.9999999999% (12 nines). Data is copied between different availability zones inside the region.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Data is copied to a secondary region. Geo-redundant storage is assured by 99.99999999999999% (16 nines). Secondary regions are pre-assigned and cannot be configured or changed. Users can’t read data from the secondary region using this replication strategy unless Microsoft Azure automatically performs a failover to the secondary region.
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
This strategy works like GRS but allows read access to data stored in the secondary region.
Users can select the replication strategy during the creation of a storage account. Once the storage account has been created and the user sets the replica strategy, the user can switch to a different strategy, depending on the type of strategy initially configured.
Storage accounts configured with a ZRS strategy cannot be converted to or from any other replica strategy. We can only switch from LRS to GRS, or RA-GRS, and vice versa.
I hope now you have a greater awareness of Azure storage replication strategies.
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