In today’s cloud-first world, ensuring data resilience and availability across geographies is more critical than ever. Microsoft’s new Cross-zone-region replication feature—currently in preview—marks a significant evolution in replication capabilities, offering unprecedented flexibility and protection for your workloads.
🌍 What Is Cross-Zone-Region Replication?
Cross-zone-region replication is an extension of existing cross-region and cross-zone replication strategies. It allows you to configure two protection volumes for a single source volume, combining any mix of cross-region and cross-zone replication. This means you can now replicate data:
- Across zones within a region
- Across regions
- Or a hybrid of both, tailored to your resilience and latency needs
🔄 Key Capabilities
- Dual Replication Paths: Configure two independent replication targets for a single source volume, enhancing fault tolerance and recovery options.
- Cross-Subscription Support: Replication is now supported across subscriptions under the same tenant, simplifying multi-team and multi-project architectures.
- Preview Availability: This feature is currently in preview, giving early adopters a chance to test and provide feedback before general availability.
🧠 Why It Matters
This new replication model empowers architects and infrastructure teams to:
- Design highly resilient architectures that span both zones and regions
- Reduce recovery time objectives (RTO) and data loss risks
- Support multi-subscription deployments without complex workarounds
🛠️ Use Case Scenarios
- Mission-Critical Applications: Ensure zero data loss by replicating to both a nearby zone and a distant region.
- Compliance-Driven Workloads: Meet geographic data residency requirements while maintaining high availability.
- Dev/Test Environments: Safely replicate across subscriptions for isolated testing without impacting production.
📌 Getting Started
To explore this feature:
- Navigate to your ANF volumes sub page
- Choose the ANF volume to wish to replicate
- Copy the ResourceID of the ANF volume
- Create a data replication volume in the zone or region required
- During the creation of the ANF data replication volume, paste in the ResourceID of the source volume, then follow the remainder of the creation process
- To create a second replica, repeat the process above.
⚠️ Note: This feature is in public preview.
💬 Summary
Cross-zone-region replication is a powerful addition to the cloud resilience toolkit. By enabling flexible, multi-path replication strategies—including cross-subscription support—it helps organisations build robust, scalable, and compliant infrastructures.
Stay tuned for updates as this feature moves toward general availability. If you’re testing it already, share your feedback to help shape its future!
I hope this short blog post about using Terraform to configure Azure NetApp Files Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery features using IaC method with Terraform has been useful.
For more information on the Azure NetApp Files service, check out the What’s new in Azure NetApp Files page.