Today, we are announcing the public preview offering for Manual failover. This feature is part of IoT Hub cloud service and allows customers to failover an IoT hub instance from its primary Azure region to its corresponding geo-paired region.

Failures are possible in any software system especially when it's a distributed system and it is important to plan for failures. The IoT Hub service implements redundancies at various layers of its implementation to safeguard its customers against transient failures and failures scoped within a datacenter. The service offers a high level of SLA using these redundancies. However, region wide failures or extended outages, although remote are still possible.

The IoT Hub service provides cross regional automatic disaster recovery as a default mitigation for such failures. The recovery time objective for this recovery process is 2 – 26 hours. IoT solutions which cannot afford to be down for so long, can now use the IoT Hub manual failover feature to failover their IoT hubs from one region to another in a self-serve manner. The recovery time objective for IoT Hub manual failover is 10 min – 2 hours.

More details about this feature can be found in the article that outlines the high availability and disaster recovery features of the IoT Hub service. Use the How-to guide for manual failover as a step-by-step guide to perform manual failover for your hub. You can also check out the Internet of Things Show on Channel 9 to learn more about this feature.