The read-replica traps, quorum surprises and DR drills teams skip until it's too late.
Always On Availability Groups remain among the most commonly misunderstood high-availability technologies in the SQL Server world. In this note we walk through five failure patterns we routinely encounter — wrong quorum model for the topology, read-replica staleness treated as scaling strategy, missing tabletop DR drills, no automated failover validation and unmanaged distributed AGs — and how each is best avoided.