Reliability in Azure Image Builder (AIB)
This article contains cross-region disaster recovery and business continuity.
Azure Image Builder (AIB) is a regional service with a cluster that serves single regions. The AIB regional setup keeps data and resources within the regional boundary. AIB as a service doesn't do fail over for cluster and SQL database in region down scenarios.
Note
Azure Image Builder doesn't support availability zones.
Cross-region disaster recovery and business continuity
Disaster recovery (DR) is about recovering from high-impact events, such as natural disasters or failed deployments that result in downtime and data loss. Regardless of the cause, the best remedy for a disaster is a well-defined and tested DR plan and an application design that actively supports DR. Before you begin to think about creating your disaster recovery plan, see Recommendations for designing a disaster recovery strategy.
When it comes to DR, Microsoft uses the shared responsibility model. In a shared responsibility model, Microsoft ensures that the baseline infrastructure and platform services are available. At the same time, many Azure services don't automatically replicate data or fall back from a failed region to cross-replicate to another enabled region. For those services, you're responsible for setting up a disaster recovery plan that works for your workload. Most services that run on Azure platform as a service (PaaS) offerings provide features and guidance to support DR and you can use service-specific features to support fast recovery to help develop your DR plan.
To ensure fast and easy recovery for Azure Image Builder (AIB), it's recommended that you run an image template in region pairs or multiple regions when designing your AIB solution. You should also replicate resources from the start when you're setting up your image templates.
Multi-region geography disaster recovery
When a regional disaster occurs, Microsoft is responsible for outage detection, notifications, and support for AIB. However, you're responsible for setting up disaster recovery for the control (service side) and data planes.
Outage detection, notification, and management
Microsoft sends a notification if there's an outage in the Azure Image Builder (AIB) Service. One common outage symptom is image templates getting 500 errors when attempting to run. You can review Azure Image Builder outage notifications and status updates through support request management.
Set up disaster recovery and outage detection
You're responsible for setting up disaster recovery for your Azure Image Builder (AIB) environment, as there isn't a region failover at the AIB service side. You need to configure both the control plane (service side) and data plane.
It's recommended that you create an AIB resource in another nearby region, into which you can replicate your resources. For more information, see the supported regions and what resources are included in an AIB creation.
Single-region geography disaster recovery
In the case of a diaster for single-region, you still need to get an image template resource from that region even when that region isn't available. You can either maintain a copy of an image template locally or can use Azure Resource Graph from the Azure portal to get an image template resource.
To get an image template resource using Resource Graph from the Azure portal:
Go to the search bar in Azure portal and search for resource graph explorer.
Use the search bar on the far left to search resource by type and name to see how the details give you properties of the image template. The See details option on the bottom right shows the image template's properties attribute and tags separately. Template name, location, ID, and tenant ID can be used to get the correct image template resource.
Capacity and proactive disaster recovery resiliency
Microsoft and its customers operate under the shared responsibility model. In customer-enabled DR (customer-responsible services), you're responsible for addressing DR for any service you deploy and control. To ensure that recovery is proactive, you should always pre-deploy secondaries. Without pre-deployed secondaries, there's no guarantee of capacity at time of impact.
When planning where to replicate a template, consider:
- AIB region availability:
- Choose AIB supported regions close to your users.
- AIB continually expands into new regions.
- Azure paired regions:
- For your geographic area, choose two regions paired together.
- Recovery efforts for paired regions where prioritization is needed.
Additional guidance
In regards to your data processing information, refer to the Azure Image Builder data residency details.