Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture
Distribute a web application across two Azure regions in an active-active configuration, using Azure Traffic Manager to route users to the nearest healthy endpoint.
Beyond a Single Region
Even with availability zones, a workload deployed in a single Azure region can be affected by a regional outage — a rare but possible event caused by a major disaster, severe storm, or large-scale infrastructure failure. For the highest levels of availability, enterprises deploy workloads across two or more Azure regions, allowing the application to continue serving users even if an entire region goes offline.
Active-Active vs. Active-Passive
There are two main multi-region patterns:
- Active-Active — resources in both regions serve live traffic simultaneously. This maximises availability and can also reduce latency by routing users to the nearest region.
- Active-Passive — resources in the secondary region are on standby and only receive traffic after a failover event. This costs less but has a longer recovery time.
For the highest availability, active-active is the preferred approach.
All lessons in this course
- Azure SLAs and Composite SLAs
- Availability Sets and Availability Zones
- Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture
- Health Probes and Graceful Degradation