Service Bus Failover without Initiate Pairing

Question

I understand for Premium Tier Service Bus, there's a Geo-Recovery tab where we could Initiate Pairing to a secondary namespace.

My questions here are,

1. If I don't initiate a pairing in advance, can I still failover / DR to a ad-hoc added secondary namespace later on, only when the primary namespace is down/offline?
2. By doing so, I assume I will still able to use the current "alias" so that is doesn't require the clients to change their connection string?
3. However, in the primary namespace, my applications (clients) might have dynamically created some new topics & subscriptions, will all these been sync over to the ad-hoc created secondary namespace as well?

Please advise.

Answer 1

@John Wong Yek Hon Thanks for reaching out. For the Premium Tier Service Bus, the Geo-Disaster Recovery feature is designed to ensure that the entire configuration of a namespace (entities, configuration, properties) is continuously replicated from a primary namespace to a secondary namespace with which it is paired. This allows you to initiate a once-only failover move from the primary to the secondary at any time

If you don't initiate a pairing in advance, you cannot failover to an ad-hoc added secondary namespace later on. The pairing must be set up in advance to ensure that the secondary namespace is continuously updated with the primary namespace's configuration. This setup is crucial for the failover process to work correctly

When you initiate a failover, the alias name for the namespace is re-pointed to the secondary namespace, ensuring that the connection string remains unchanged for the clients

However, it's important to note that the Geo-Disaster Recovery feature only replicates the metadata (queues, topics, subscriptions, filters) and does not replicate the messages held in queues or topic subscriptions

Therefore, any dynamically created topics and subscriptions in the primary namespace will be replicated to the secondary namespace if the pairing is set up in advance

If you have any more questions or need further clarification, feel free to ask

For more information please refer: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/936332/azure-servicebus-paired-namespace

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/service-bus-geo-dr