Disaster Recovery Strategy for Azure Synapse Analytics

Disasters can be unpredictable with time. It can hamper regular workloads and processes, which could result in security risks, data loss and increase in costs. Since most organizations are migrating into cloud, it is important to have a disaster recovery strategy that could help during such circumstances.

In my last two blogs, I had explained how to setup and manage DevOps for Azure Synapse Analytics. This would allow organizations to have a proper control over the environment, especially in production. However, it is also critical to have a backup plan, ready for action, if things within the production synapse environment go south.

What to expect?

This blog will explain how to setup a business continuity or disaster recovery strategy using CI/CD for securing Azure Synapse Analytics service.

Prerequisites

To follow along the explanation, kindly check my last blog on promoting database objects within Azure Synapse workspaces.

a) Two synapse environments - development and target, where we will create a backup of the development workspace and restore it into the target workspace. In the example, I have synapsedemo121 as my development synapse workspace and synapsedemo121test as my target workspace.

b) Each synapse environment has a dedicated pool. In the example, I have Dedicated_Pool as my Dedicated SQL pool for both the workspaces.

Methodology

Step 1: Create a Release pipeline

Go to Releases option in Azure DevOps and create a new release pipeline.

Step 2: Select the Build Artifact

Here, I have selected the Synapse Workspace Build pipeline that was created to promote synapse pipeline artifacts to other workspaces. For detailed explanation on the build pipeline, please check out Step 4 on this blog.

Step 3: Create a Restore Point

This REST API agentless job will create a restore point for the Dedicated SQL Pool in the development synapse workspace synapsedemo121.

Step 4: Create a Dedicated SQL Pool using the Restore Point

This Azure PowerShell agent job will restore the dedicated pool to our target synapse workspace synapsedemo121test. The new dedicated pool in the target workspace will be called DR_Dedicated_Pool. Trigger the release pipeline by clicking Create release.

Step 5: Verify the new Dedicated Pool in Target Synapse Environment

Once the release pipeline runs successfully, we can verify the creation of the dedicated pool DR_Dedicated_Pool in synapsedemo121test.

The dedicated pool has been successfully created in our target synapse environment.

Next, let’s verify the database objects within the pool.

Great! The DR_Dedicated_Pool in the target synapse workspace includes all the objects that were existing in the Dedicated_Pool within the development synapse workspace.

I hope everyone who wishes to setup a disaster recovery strategy for Azure Synapse Analytics at their organization, finds this blog useful. Feel free to provide your thoughts and questions on the comments below.

Until then, Happy Blogging!