There are many great ways in Azure to protect your data and ensure it is available. One way you can protect your data and make sure it is highly available and accessible is using object replication for your blob storage. Object replication is also covered in the AZ-104 exam. Let’s dive in and explore this topic further and see what you need to know for the exam.
What is Object Replication in Azure Storage
Object storage replication is a method for automatically copying block blobs from one storage account to another. It helps ensure data availability and redundancy across different geographical locations. It uses a replication policy the user defines to specify both the source and destination storage accounts.
The policy contains something called a replication rule to designate a specific source and destination containers that detail exactly which block blobs will be replicated. This asynchronous operation allows data to be duplicated without affecting the source account’s performance. This helps to maintain data integrity and accessibility across multiple regions.
Key Features and Benefits
Utilizing premium block blob accounts can enhance your data replication strategy, offering faster access speeds and minimizing latency. High availability is achieved by replicating data across multiple storage accounts, ensuring data is accessible even in the event of a regional outage.
Pre-requisites
There are a few things you need to consider for setting up object replication in Microsoft Azure. These include creating the source storage account and destination storage account. These can be either the general-purpose v2 storage accounts or premium block blob accounts.
You also need to have blob versioning turned on for the source and destination Azure storage accounts. Create or designate a source container for the object replication policy. Also, create or designate a destination storage container in the target storage account.
Additionally, you need to allow “cross tenant replication” on the storage account for the replication option to display under the Data management menu.
Setting Up Azure Storage Accounts for Replication
In the source storage account below, you can see we have a container created.
In the destination storage account, we also have a destination container.
Let’s consider how you can configure object replication in Azure using the Azure Portal. Navigate to your source storage account > Data management > Object replication.
Now that we are in the Object replication dashboard, we need to Create replication rules. Click this button.
The Create replication rules blade is very straightforward. First under the Destination details section, we need to select the destination subscription and the Destination storage account. Then on the Container pair details, you pair up the source and destination containers that will be assigned to the rule.
Finally, click Create.
Now we can see the replication rule we have created in the source storage account to enable object replication.
Looking at the contents of the container in the source account, we see the following:
Under the destination account, we see the following matching objects:
Also, for each object that is included with replication, you can see the Object replication status if you view the properties of the object:
Technical Considerations and Best Practices
Let’s look at a couple of considerations and best practices related to configured object replication.
Minimizing Latency and Ensuring Data Consistency
Minimize latency by selecting storage accounts in regions close to your user base. This helps with consistent asynchronous replication to replicate data in a timely manner.
Replication Rules and Error Handling
Define clear replication rules to control which data is replicated and manage how replication is performed across different regions. Monitor for errors to have visibility to issues with replicated objects so these are quickly resolved.
Managing Data Replication and Distribution
Effective data management involves monitoring replication status and using features like the change feed to synchronize data across the source and destination accounts.
The change feed provides logs of all the changes that occur to the blobs and the blob metadata in your storage account. The feed provides ordered, guaranteed, durable, immutable, read-only log of these changes.
By enabling change feed, you ensure that all changes, including write operations and delete operations, are captured and replicated.
This feature is under the data protection menu:
Wrapping up Object replication
Understanding how to enable and manage the object replication feature in Azure Storage is important for the AZ-104 exam. Be sure to understand the technical details and best practices outlined in this guide to optimize data distribution of Azure Blob storage. The object replication policy is a great way to bolster resiliency of your blob storage account and minimize downtime.
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