I have a number of databases in Azure that I want to back up in AWS, what is the best type of storage for databases in AWS ? Can this be automated in Azure ?

CodePudding user response：

In the 'old days' before Cloud Computing, back-up typically involved sending data to a secondary disaster recovery location where there was (typically inadequate) backup equipment that could takeover the activities of the primary data center.

These days, Cloud Computing provides such as AWS and Azure run multiple data centers in the one region. A 'Region' contains multiple 'Availability Zones', each of which is a separate data center.

Also, many services (eg Amazon S3, Azure Blob storage) are 'regional' services that automatically run across multiple Availability Zones. This means that a failure in one AZ does not impact operation or availability of the service. However, individual virtual machines (eg Amazon EC2, Azure VMs) run on single hosts, so each one operates in only a single AZ.

Thus, rather than attempting to copy data to a "different location" or a different cloud service, it is better to take advantage of the backup capabilities offered by the cloud provider.

From Automatic, geo-redundant backups - Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Learn:

By default, Azure SQL Database stores backups in geo-redundant storage blobs that are replicated to a paired region. Geo-redundancy helps protect against outages that affect backup storage in the primary region. It also allows you to restore your databases in a different region in the event of a regional outage.

The storage redundancy mechanism stores multiple copies of your data so that it's protected from planned and unplanned events. These events might include transient hardware failure, network or power outages, or massive natural disasters.

This would not only meet your requirement for backing up data to another location, but it also makes it quick and easy to restore data when necessary. Compare that to sending data to a different cloud provider, where you would be responsible for converting file formats, launching replacement services and loading data from backup. That type of thing really isn't necessary if you are using a managed database service.

Backing-up data is easy. Restoring is hard!

Bottom line: Use a managed database (eg Azure SQL Database) and use the managed backup options they provide. They will give you the redundancy you seek, while making the process MUCH easier to manage.