Disaster Recovery in Azure Functions

Data centers operating the cloud, including Azure, consist of many servers. Some of these servers regularly fail. Fortunately, Azure infrastructure is robust enough to automatically replicate any applications from the failed hardware to the hardware that is still operational.

However, without any disaster recovery measures in place, we might still lose our data even if the application itself recovers. Also, hardware failure is not the only way we can lose our application. For example, our services might get attacked by malicious actors.

This is why we need a robust disaster recovery policy for Azure Functions. While it might not be as critical for completely stateless functions, as they don’t hold any data, disaster recovery is important for any functions that connect to a database or use data bindings. The playground below demonstrates a function app with Cosmos DB bindings. Since it connects to a database, we would almost certainly need to implement a disaster recovery policy for both the database and the function, especially if the database contains ...