Book excerpt: This book is your field guide to planning, deploying, managing, and troubleshooting Always On Availability Groups. The Always On Availability Groups feature is an enterprise-level solution for high availability and disaster recovery. Always On provides a rich set of options that reduce overhead and resource usage and enable database administrators to implement and manage high availability and disaster recovery solutions far more easily than by implementing the log-shipping and database-mirroring solutions of the past. Pro SQL Server Always On Availability Groups shows how to reduce downtime, maximize application availability, and provide data protection. The goal is always to have your SQL Server databases up and running whenever you need them, rain or shine, disaster or otherwise. With a focus on real-world experiences and war stories, authors Uttam Parui and Vivek Sanil offer you: Tips, tricks, and best practices for architecting and deploying availability groups. The confidence required to manage and monitor availability groups. Techniques to troubleshoot common issues that you may face during and after deploying availability groups in a mission-critical production environment. What You Will Learn Grasp important concepts underlying high-availability and disaster recovery. Plan and deploy Always On Availability Groups in your corporate environment. Manage Availability Groups to ensure constant readiness and high throughput. Monitor Availability Group performance and troubleshoot problems fast. Build on the cloud and make Windows Azure part of your availability solution. Employ proven techniques and best practices as tested and shared by the authors. Audience Pro SQL Server Always On Availability Groups is aimed at SQL Server architects, database administrators, and IT professionals who are tasked with architecting and deploying a high-availability and disaster recovery solution involving Microsoft SQL Server. This book is also for SQL Server support staff who will be managing and supporting existing availability group deployments.