Good article and particularly useful on the Galera replication - if you google replication, the tutorials that come up first are native mysql Master-Master repl

Good article and particularly useful on the Galera replication - if you google replication, the tutorials that come up first are native mysql Master-Master replication which are difficult to setup and very likely to fail. I've been on azure for almost a year now and it is essential that you use their availability sets as their emails about "planned maintenance" often come sporadically after they do the maintenance. In one upgrade they somehow managed to shutdown and not restart my instances, so i also recommend having an externally hosted monitoring server if you have mission-critical stuff on azure.