Can someone please explain me what I need to do in order to make my websites available all the time using Microsoft azure.
At the moment I have just one dedicated server with IIS (running 7 websites) and SQL Server - all on one machine. Beside this I use Redis-lab as cloud service for hosting Redis cache.
I'm more or less happy how this works, but in case that something happens with server, or I need to restart it of course my website goes down which is not good of course.
So in order to make mitigate some of risks what exactly I need to do?
Am I correct in flowing thinking?
Option 1 - I need one more machine in an availability set with load balancer. This solution is not great as one server will still have an instance of SQL Server running = if that server goes down, websites on the second server will not work as the database is down
Option 2 - I need 3 more servers. 2 for IIS in a load balanced environment and 2 for SQL Server - which is super expensive solution.
Option 3 - 2 more servers. Where existing server and the new one will be for IIS (load balanced) + 3rd server with database. The database server will be write only. Both IIS severs will have an instance of ms SQL running in readonly mode => content from database server will be replicated to their databases. In this scenario if SQL Server goes down websites will still work as they will pull data from their own read only databases
Are there any other options?
Thanks




