High availability design patterns in Azure - Mini Project: Build & Apply

High Availability Design Patterns in Azure

📖 Scenario: You are working for a company that wants to ensure their web application is always available to users, even if one part of the system fails. They want to use Azure services to build a highly available architecture.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Azure infrastructure setup that uses high availability design patterns including multiple virtual machines behind a load balancer and availability sets.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource group named HighAvailabilityRG

Create two virtual machines named vm1 and vm2 in an availability set

Create an availability set named AppAvailabilitySet

Create a load balancer named AppLoadBalancer that distributes traffic to both VMs

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

High availability design patterns are essential for business-critical applications to avoid downtime and provide continuous service to users.

💼 Career

Cloud architects and infrastructure engineers use these patterns to design resilient systems that meet uptime requirements.

1

Create the resource group and availability set

Create a resource group called HighAvailabilityRG in the eastus region. Then create an availability set called AppAvailabilitySet inside this resource group.

Azure

# Your code here to create resource group and availability set

Need a hint?

Use az group create to create the resource group and az vm availability-set create to create the availability set.

2

Create two virtual machines in the availability set

Create two virtual machines named vm1 and vm2 inside the HighAvailabilityRG resource group. Both VMs must be part of the AppAvailabilitySet availability set. Use the UbuntuLTS image and size Standard_B1s.

Azure

az group create --name HighAvailabilityRG --location eastus
az vm availability-set create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name AppAvailabilitySet --platform-fault-domain-count 2 --platform-update-domain-count 2
# Your code here to create vm1 and vm2 in the availability set

Need a hint?

Use az vm create with the --availability-set option to place VMs in the availability set.

3

Create a load balancer to distribute traffic

Create a public load balancer named AppLoadBalancer in the HighAvailabilityRG resource group. Configure it to distribute incoming HTTP traffic on port 80 to both vm1 and vm2.

Azure

az group create --name HighAvailabilityRG --location eastus
az vm availability-set create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name AppAvailabilitySet --platform-fault-domain-count 2 --platform-update-domain-count 2
az vm create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name vm1 --image UbuntuLTS --size Standard_B1s --availability-set AppAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az vm create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name vm2 --image UbuntuLTS --size Standard_B1s --availability-set AppAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
# Your code here to create and configure the load balancer

Need a hint?

Use az network lb create to create the load balancer and az network lb rule create to add a rule for HTTP traffic.

4

Associate virtual machines' network interfaces with the load balancer backend pool

Associate the network interfaces of vm1 and vm2 with the backend address pool AppBackendPool of the AppLoadBalancer load balancer.

Azure

az group create --name HighAvailabilityRG --location eastus
az vm availability-set create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name AppAvailabilitySet --platform-fault-domain-count 2 --platform-update-domain-count 2
az vm create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name vm1 --image UbuntuLTS --size Standard_B1s --availability-set AppAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az vm create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name vm2 --image UbuntuLTS --size Standard_B1s --availability-set AppAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys
az network public-ip create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name AppPublicIP --allocation-method Static --sku Standard
az network lb create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --name AppLoadBalancer --frontend-ip-name LoadBalancerFrontEnd --backend-pool-name AppBackendPool --public-ip-address AppPublicIP
az network lb rule create --resource-group HighAvailabilityRG --lb-name AppLoadBalancer --name HTTPRule --protocol Tcp --frontend-port 80 --backend-port 80 --frontend-ip-name LoadBalancerFrontEnd --backend-pool-name AppBackendPool
# Your code here to associate vm1 and vm2 NICs with the backend pool

Need a hint?

Use az network nic ip-config address-pool add to add each VM's network interface to the load balancer backend pool.