Azure High Availability, Replication & DR — Azure DocumentDB
Azure DocumentDB's resiliency model has three layers. Pick the right combination for the workload — production-critical workloads should use all three.
| Layer | What it protects against | SLA contribution | Automatic? |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-region HA (standby shard per primary, synchronous replication) | Node / zone failures within a region | 99.99% | ✅ Failover is automatic; connection string is unchanged |
| Cross-region replica (active-passive, asynchronous) | Regional outage; provides read scale-out | + 0.005% → 99.995% combined | ❌ Promotion is customer-triggered (shared-responsibility DR); HA must be re-enabled on the promoted cluster |
| Automatic backups (35 d active / 7 d deleted clusters) | Accidental deletion or corruption | — | ✅ Continuous, no perf impact |
Replication model at a glance
- Primary ↔ standby shard (in-region): synchronous — every write commits to both before the client gets an ack, so failover is lossless and reads on the standby (after promotion) are strongly consistent. With HA on, each shard has 6 replicas in total: 3 LRS replicas under the primary shard + 3 LRS replicas under the standby shard. In AZ-enabled regions the primary and standby sit in different availability zones.
- Primary cluster ↔ cross-region replica: asynchronous — design for eventual consistency on the replica. Some writes acknowledged on the primary may not yet be on the replica, so regional promotion has a non-zero RPO (recent writes can be lost). Replication lag scales with the primary's write intensity and the load on both clusters.
- Without HA: each shard uses locally-redundant storage (LRS) with 3 synchronous Azure Storage replicas. Single-replica failures are auto-healed by Azure Storage (CRC checks + network checksums protect against silent corruption), but a zone or region failure can cause downtime and possible data loss. HA is also a prerequisite for availability-zone placement.
Applications connect to a cluster through a single connection string and endpoint regardless of shard count. The multi-shard topology is fully abstracted — a 16-shard cluster looks like one MongoDB endpoint to the driver.
Feature comparison
How HA and cross-region replicas protect different failure modes:
| Failure scenario | Feature | No data loss (RPO = 0) | Survives region-wide outage | Automatic failover | Connection string preserved |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical shard / zone failure | In-region HA | ✅ (synchronous) | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Regional outage | Cross-region replica | ❌ (asynchronous; RPO > 0) | ✅ | ❌ (customer-triggered) | ✅ ¹ |
¹ Only when the application uses the Global read-write connection string (<cluster>.global.mongocluster.cosmos.azure.com). The cluster-specific / "self" connection string becomes read-only after promotion.
Best-practice decision matrix
| Scenario | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Production cluster | Enable HA |
| Need 99.99% SLA | Enable HA |
| Need 99.995% SLA | Enable HA and create a cross-region replica |
| Automatic failover from node/zone failure | Enable HA |
| Cross-region disaster recovery | Create a replica cluster |
| Read scale-out within a single region (analytics / reporting offload) | Create a same-region replica (no DR benefit; you can have only one replica per primary, so this trades cross-region DR for in-region read offload) |
| Read scale-out across regions | Create a replica cluster |
| Availability-zone placement required | Enable HA (HA is required for AZ support) |
| Non-production / dev-test cluster | Disable HA to reduce cost |
| Recover from accidental delete/modify | Automatic backups (35-day retention for active clusters) |
Rules
- ha-enable-for-production — Enable HA on all production clusters for the 99.99% SLA, automatic failover, zone redundancy, and zero-data-loss synchronous replication.
- ha-cross-region-replica — Add an active-passive replica (cross-region for DR + read scale-out, same-region for pure read scale-out); HA + cross-region replica = 99.995% SLA. Includes the post-promotion runbook (re-enable HA, update connection strings, restore the replica).
- ha-backup-retention — Automatic backups are taken continuously and retained for 35 days on active clusters and 7 days on deleted clusters. Use them to recover from accidental deletes or modifications.
References
- Best practices for HA and cross-region replication in Azure DocumentDB
- Reliability in Azure DocumentDB
- Availability and disaster recovery in Azure DocumentDB — behind the scenes — cluster anatomy, 6-replica HA layout, replication-lag drivers