Redundancy and Load Balancing is a must in any important business where we need our resources to be available as much as possible as well as protecting our data and other resources. Why do we have redundancy? Unfortunately, no matter how much effort and resources we put behind building the perfect compute, network, or storage system there will inherently be failures which could come from failing hardware, failing software, a simple human mistake, and even natural disasters to name of few. Having redundancy in mind from the beginning as opposed to an afterthought is absolutely crucial. This was true with on-premises and it’s also true in the Cloud. Redundancy allows us to experience these failures and outages yet continue to have our services operate well for our users as if it never happened.

The good news is that when using a cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure, it is then Microsoft’s job to provide this redundancy instead of managing it ourselves. Likewise Load Balancing allows our services to become more available which can directly affect performance of our services. The catch here is that while Microsoft Azure may hold the responsibility of this type of resiliency, it is still up to us to configure our services within Azure to take full advantage of these features. We are going to learn how to do this right now.