cross-region DR in Azure Databricks (24h RPO/RTO)

[Deny1]

Hi,

We're designing a DR strategy for an Azure Databricks platform and would appreciate guidance on current best practices for achieving approximately 24-hour RPO and RTO across Azure regions.

Our platform includes Unity Catalog, DAB, Jobs, Notebooks, SQL Warehouses, Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines, Materialized Views, Streaming Tables, Delta Sharing, and related security/governance components.

Our current approach is:

• Primary workspace in North Europe
• Standby workspace in West Europe
• Separate metastores per region
• DAB deployment to both workspaces
• DR resources kept paused until failover
• Nightly replication of business-critical data
• Recovery through a combination of replication, replay, and recomputation

A few questions:

1. Is a warm-standby workspace the recommended pattern today?
2. What is the preferred approach for Unity Catalog and metadata across regions?
3. How are customers handling Lakeflow Pipelines, Streaming Tables, and Materialized Views given the lack of native cross-region replication?
4. Is replay/recomputation the recommended recovery model for pipeline outputs?
5. What are common approaches for SQL Warehouses, dashboards, alerts, and region-specific IDs?
6. Are there reference architectures or proven customer patterns for 24h RPO/RTO on Azure Databricks?
7. What DR limitations should we account for regarding Managed Volumes, MLflow models, Delta Shares, Vector Search, Genie assets, and similar services?

We're interested in both official Databricks guidance and real-world implementations from other customers.

Thanks in advance.

[pradeep_singh]

Your overall design is sensible, but Databricks’ current recommendation is to use Managed Disaster Recovery when your account is eligible. If Managed DR is unavailable, use an active-passive warm standby with Terraform/DABs, cross-region data replication, and a tested failover runbook. Your separate North Europe and West Europe workspaces/metastores are a normal pattern, and both regions are listed as supported for Managed DR.

The main caution is that a nightly copy alone does not guarantee a 24-hour RPO/RTO. You must also recover pipelines, streaming state, dashboards, models, sharing, networking, and other dependencies that are not automatically replicated