Reliability in Azure Bot Service
When you create an application (bot) in Azure, you can choose whether or not your bot resource will have global or local data residency. Local data residency ensures that your bot's personal data is preserved, stored, and processed within certain geographic boundaries (like EU boundaries).
Important
Availability zone support is not enabled for any standard channels in the regional bot service.
This article describes reliability support in Azure Bot Service, and covers both regional reliability with availability zones and cross-region resiliency with disaster recovery for bots with local data residency. For a more detailed overview of reliability in Azure, see Azure reliability.
For more information on deploying bots with local data residency and regional compliance, see Regionalization in Azure Bot Service.
Availability zone support
Availability zones are physically separate groups of datacenters within each Azure region. When one zone fails, services can fail over to one of the remaining zones.
For more information on availability zones in Azure, see What are availability zones?.
For regional bots, Azure Bot Service supports zone redundancy by default. You don't need to set it up or reconfigure for availability zone support.
Prerequisites
- Your bot must be regional (not global).
- Currently, only the "westeurope" region supports availability zones.
Zone down experience
During a zone-wide outage, the customer should expect a brief degradation of performance, until the service's self-healing rebalances underlying capacity to adjust to healthy zones. This isn't dependent on zone restoration; it's expected that the Microsoft-managed service self-healing state compensates for a lost zone, using capacity from other zones.
Cross-region disaster recovery in multi-region geography
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.
Azure Bot Service runs in active-active mode for both global and regional services. When an outage occurs, you don't need to detect errors or manage the service. Azure Bot Service automatically performs autofailover and auto recovery in a multi-region geographical architecture. For the EU bot regional service, Azure Bot Service provides two full regions inside Europe with active/active replication to ensure redundancy. For the global bot service, all available regions/geographies can be served as the global footprint.