New high availability features for Azure Notification Hubs (Preview)

Heather Tian

We are excited to announce that the new high availability features Availability Zones and flexible disaster recovery are now available for preview for your ANH push notifications. Azure Notification Hubs currently offers default paired secondary regions that act as a backup in case of a regional outage. If the primary region becomes unavailable, ANH will automatically fail over to the secondary region and resume sending push notifications to your devices.

What is high availability?

High availability is a key requirement for any modern cloud application. High availability is the ability of a system to remain operational and accessible with minimal downtime or disruption. Having high availability ANH features is important for applications that rely on push notifications to communicate with users, such as news, social media, gaming, and e-commerce apps. It ensures that users can access the services and data without any interruption, even in the event of a failure or disaster. Thus, ensuring the notifications are sent and any customer data stored is not lost.

What are the new features for ANH?

ANH has recently introduced two new features that enhance its high availability: availability zones and flexible region disaster recovery.

• Availability zones: This feature allows you to distribute your notification hub across three physically isolated zones within a region, which reduces the impact of zone-level failures. If one zone becomes unavailable, ANH will automatically route your push notifications to the other zones. You can enable availability zones for your notification hub from the Azure portal or the Azure CLI. This feature will be available as an add-on to any SKU for $350 per month. During preview, you will not be charged but once the feature is generally available, you will be charged automatically.

• Flexible region disaster recovery: All tiers provide a flexible
  recovery region option, enabling you to choose from a list of
  supported regions. In regions with availability zones and no region
  pair, you can use flexible recovery to choose a failover region that provides resiliency in the event of a full region failure.

Note: If you choose not to continue with your Availability Zone namespace at any point and would like to have a non-Availability Zone namespace, you will need to delete and recreate the namespace as migration is not supported at the moment.

For more information, please refer to the following documentation:

Azure Notification Hubs high availability

We hope you enjoy the new high availability features for ANH and we look forward to hearing your feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve our service and make it easier for you to use. Thank you for choosing Azure Notification Hubs!

Heather Tian

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