22-25 April 2026 
Automating Clusterless Availability Group failovers
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
This is a demo of using a scripted solution to safely failover clusterless availability groups: 'ReadScale' which is available on Standard Edition for DR requirements, and Distributed Availability Groups which is available on Enterprise, and is often used for DR and migration purposes. It'll touch on the pre-requisites, the safety checks to ensure failover is viable, the failover process, and the post-failover checks to ensure that we are production-ready.
Session Details
Clusterless Availability Groups are an often overlooked technoogy that offers Disaster Recovery without the additional complexity of stretch clusters. As SQL Server does not handle failover, a more automated framework is required to safely failover.
In this demo, I will demonstrate a scripted solution that I've made public on Github that will check for safety, failover the Availability Group, and then resume the Availability Group to all the replicas.
In this demo, I will demonstrate a scripted solution that I've made public on Github that will check for safety, failover the Availability Group, and then resume the Availability Group to all the replicas.
3 things you'll get out of this session
1. This will demonstrate an automated POC for safely failing over clusterless AGs, a challenge particularly for Standard edition which has a one-database-per-AG restriction.
2. Attendees will see that clusterless AGs are viable for production/DR workloads - we just need to fill the tooling gaps.