Ensure high availability of Windows Azure website

Question

What would be the proper way to deploy Windows Azure Web sites to ensure maximum availability, even in case of datacenter issues?

I am facing a service outage as I write, due to the ongoing "partial service interruption" affecting websites in West Europe in the last 6 hours.

It is kind of moot to setup redundant database instances (and redundant everything, really) if my web endpoint can die on my customers. I've already verified that increasing instance count does not really improve the robustness of Azure websites in such situations.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

We are experiencing the same issue at the moment :( We have created another website in EU North and uploaded our site to there. We have then setup automatic DNS failover using DNSMadeEasy. Unfortunately it will take some time for propogation so in the mean time we are just asking our users to visit the temporary URL. This should hopefully mitigate issues like this in the future.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Since this answer was accepted, MS have released Azure traffic manager, which allows you to configure a failover to another instance, running on another region.

More info: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-overview/