Last week we introduced breakthrough visualization experiences for the business continuity capabilities in Azure SQL Database. Setting up and administering your geo-replication is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Using the Preview Portal you can configure and manage Standard and Active Geo-Replication directly on an interactive map control which also provides live replication status feedback.  Creating a geo-replicated secondary to protect a primary database from regional disasters or to provide load balancing for read workloads is now as simple as clicking on a map.  This breakthrough experience further drives near-zero administration productivity for IT and application developers.

The database blade on the Premium and Standard database includes the Geo-replication section that  brings you to an interactive map where you can easily select the location of each secondary. In the case of a Standard database you can only create one secondary in the recommended location. In the case of a Premium database you can create up to 4 secondaries in any region on the map.

If you don’t have any logical servers in the the chosen region the UI allows you to easily create a new one. The following example shows a configuration of three secondaries in three different geographies and the intermediate geo-replication states. In the case of active geo-replication all secondaries are readable so in addition to the disaster protection the applications can use them to load balance the local read-only traffic.

The following video will take you though the entire workflow of choosing the geo-replication option, configuring it for your database and failing over in case of a disaster.

Both active and standard geo-replication capabilities are generally available. Please try this Portal experience and let us know what you think. You can read more about the these features in these posts published earlier this year: Active Geo-Replication  from July 12 and Standard geo-replication published from September 3.