In Development: ExpressRoute resiliency enhancement

ExpressRoute provides private connectivity between on-premises networks and Azure, ensuring low latency and high throughput. Customers can create an ExpressRoute circuit at a peering location through redundant Microsoft Enterprise Edge devices. For high availability and disaster recovery, setting up ExpressRoute circuits in multiple peering locations is highly recommended.

Resiliency architectures: There are three resiliency architectures: maximum, high, and standard resiliency. Maximum resiliency eliminates single points of failure and is ideal for mission-critical workloads. High resiliency, also known as ExpressRoute Metro, offers resilience within the same metropolitan area. Standard resiliency provides built-in redundancy but lacks site resiliency, making it less suitable for mission-critical workloads. Microsoft has developed a guided portal experience to make it easy for you to configure high and maximum resiliency architectures.

Zonal resiliency: Availability zones protect applications and data from data center failures and offer higher availability for mission-critical services on Azure. Existing non-zone redundant ExpressRoute gateways can now migrate to availability zone-enabled gateways.

Resiliency validation: This upcoming feature will allow customers to test site-failover during maintenance or interruptions, ensuring connectivity and validating failover success.

Resiliency insights: This upcoming feature will give customers visibility into the resilience of their deployments. Customers can monitor their circuit and gateway deployments for actionable insights on resiliency. A resiliency index is generated based on the setup, with the highest score awarded to deployments that have undergone recent testing and validation.

SLA Updates: The SLA model for ExpressRoute will be updated to align with differentiated levels of network availability, effective from Oct 1, 2024. Revised SLA levels include 99% for a single-site circuit, 99.9% for a Metro multi-site circuit, and 99.95% for multi-homed maximum resiliency. Details on the updated ExpressRoute SLA will be published on the official website here.