ASR + Azure Traffic Manager + Azure Automation = Better Together!

The following demonstration shows an example of how one can architect a failover solution for a multi-tiered application from an on-premises environment to Azure (and back).  Azure Site Recovery provides us the ability to orchestrate failover of servers that make up a specific application.  I have implemented the freely available BlogEngine.NET blog application to represent the application to be failed over.  In this simple example, I have one web frontend running the BlogEngine web tier and a SQL server placed on a separate SQL server as the backend.  What I show is that it is possible to fully automate the planned, unplanned, and test failover of this application from its current on-premises environment to Azure.  With the additional help of a few other awesome Azure services, namely, Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Automation, I am able to provide a very clean and automatic redirection to the ‘new’ home of the application when failover happens which minimizes the disruption of the application to the end-user.  And since ASR provides true failover capabilities, I am able to also failback to the on-premises environment if I so desire – again, minimizing disruption of service to the end-user.  That is, no manual intervention necessary.

The following diagram illustrates my demo environment that I walkthrough in my video here.