Exam DP-300 topic 6 question 5 discussion

According to Microsoft, "Geo-redundant storage (with GRS or GZRS) replicates your data to another physical location in the secondary region to protect against regional outages. However, that data is available to be read only if the customer or Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to secondary region. When you enable read access to the secondary region, your data is available to be read at all times, including in a situation where the primary region becomes unavailable. For read access to the secondary region, enable read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)." So, if Primary Region is unavailable and MS did not failover, then you can only restore Backup on secondary region if it is RA-GRS.

The difference between GRS and RA-GRS: GRS - After failover, the read-only is available. If no failover, it can not be readable. RA-RGS - is always enable and read-only. If GRS is cheaper, D is the right answer.

Since I can't bring offline region in Azure, so I can't test below. But: D: Yes, it is possible to initiate a failover to the secondary region (West US 3) for your geo-redundant storage (GRS) account, even while the primary region (West US 2) is down. This process is known as a customer-managed failover. Here are the steps to initiate a failover: 1. Navigate to your storage account in the Azure portal. 2. Select "Redundancy" from the Data management section. 3. Initiate the failover by following the prompts. Once the failover is complete, the secondary region (West US 3) will become the new primary region, and your data will be accessible there. Since GRS is cheaper than RAGRS, and according to above you just need to perform a customer initiated failover when primary region is down, I think answer is D: GRS

chat - While RA-GRS offers more features with the ability to read backups in the secondary region before failover, the question's emphasis on minimizing costs and ensuring that backups can be restored during an outage points to GRS as the best fit. So I prefer D in this context

I've researched it myself and read the comments ... I'm sticking with B (RA-GRS) - I think the addition of "minimize cost" is a trick especially since this scenario relates to Azure VMs. If the scenario mentioned "failover" I'd be inclined to pick D (GRS).

ChatGPT - C.ZRS

Correct answer is D: It's cheaper. Both GRS and RA-GRS replicate data to a secondary region, providing redundancy in the event of a regional outage. RA-GRS additionally allows read access to the secondary region, which can be useful for disaster recovery scenarios. However, RA-GRS accounts are more expensive than GRS accounts.

I think the answer is D. Because D cheaper than B.

B. read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) The ask is to "building a database backup solution" so we need to be able to test the solution https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy If your storage account is configured for read access to the secondary region, then you can design your applications to seamlessly shift to reading data from the secondary region if the primary region becomes unavailable for any reason. The secondary region is available for read access after you enable RA-GRS or RA-GZRS, so that you can test your application in advance to make sure that it will properly read from the secondary in the event of an outage. For more information about how to design your applications to take advantage of geo-redundancy

Azure Storage supports account failover for geo-redundant storage accounts. With account failover, you can initiate the failover process for your storage account if the primary endpoint becomes unavailable. The failover updates the secondary endpoint to become the primary endpoint for your storage account. Once the failover is complete, clients can begin writing to the new primary endpoint. Geo-redundant storage (GRS) or geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) copies your data asynchronously in two geographic regions that are at least hundreds of miles apart. If the primary region suffers an outage, then the secondary region serves as a redundant source for your data. You can initiate a failover to transform the secondary endpoint into the primary endpoint. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-disaster-recovery-guidance

Answer is D. b/c, the use case says; "due to Azure regional outage, you need to be able to restore the database backups."

Answer is correct: B. https://medium.com/@aslanim/azure-accessing-your-sql-server-backups-in-your-ra-grs-account-17e0c7457146

D is correct. "Geo-redundant storage (with GRS or GZRS) replicates your data to another physical location in the secondary region to protect against regional outages. However, that data is available to be read only if the customer or Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to secondary region. When you enable read access to the secondary region, your data is available to be read at all times, including in a situation where the primary region becomes unavailable. For read access to the secondary region, enable read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)." https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy#read-access-to-data-in-the-secondary-region In the question's scenario, a failover to another region *is* required, so GRS is suitable. GRS is also a bit less expensive than RA-GRS.

how come RA-GRS can be cheaper as this is a addon to provide access to data in secondary region even there is no outage in primary region. GRS should be cheaper as it replicates data and only accessible once primary region has an outage. Read the below from MS. With GRS or GZRS, the data in the secondary region isn't available for read or write access unless there is a failover to the secondary region. For read access to the secondary region, configure your storage account to use read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS) In extreme circumstances where a region is lost due to a significant disaster, Microsoft may initiate a regional failover. In this case, no action on your part is required. Until the Microsoft-managed failover has completed, you won't have write access to your storage account. Your applications can read from the secondary region if your storage account is configured for RA-GRS or RA-GZRS.

D is correct as it is the cheaper option. Key word "minimize" costs.

Only D. geo-redundant https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/resiliency/recovery-loss-azure-region#recovery-by-using-geo-redundant-storage-of-blob-table-queue-and-vm-disk-storage

Disregard my comment about ZRS being the correct solution. As they note in the answer the copies made in the different zones are all in the same REGION. Here we are presented with a regional outage so ZRS will not suffice.