Enabling Geo-DR with Event Hubs (preview)

We are excited to announce the public preview for enabling Geo-Disaster Recovery for Event Hubs. This article gives an overview of how to enable regional disaster recovery capability for Event Hubs.

Disaster recovery provides the ability to recover from any regional disaster like earthquakes, storms etc. During such disasters, customers still would want business continuity, that is the ability to perform essential business functions during and after adverse conditions.

How it works?

Initially, you configure your Event Hubs namespace for disaster recovery. 'Configure' means selecting a backup Azure region for your Event Hubs namespace so that metadata of the namespace is periodically synced to a secondary namespace in the backup region.

After configuration, you continue with your normal Event Hubs usage in the active region. The only minor difference is - instead of using a namespace connection string, you use an alias connection string. You get the alias connection string after your initial configuration. The alias connection string under the hood points to the primary namespace.

When disaster strikes, you initiate a failover. At this time, the alias connection string switches to point to the secondary namespace, under the hood.

The applications then start writing and reading from the secondary namespace automatically. Since they use the alias connection string, there is no change required on these applications to use the secondary namespace.

Next Steps

The article here, describes the Geo-DR overview and how to enable it.

Refer to the sample here for a step by step walk through

You can refer to the REST API for Geo-DR configuration

Note: For this preview, only metadata is synced to the secondary namespace and not actual data.

Looking forward to you going through the articles, trying the samples and providing us feedback!