What is essential for maintaining high availability in Azure firewalls?

Maintaining high availability in Azure firewalls hinges significantly on the use of a load balancer. A load balancer ensures that the firewall traffic is evenly distributed across instances of the firewall. This distribution is crucial for preventing any single instance from becoming a bottleneck, thus maintaining optimal performance and reliability. In the event of an instance failure, the load balancer can redirect traffic to operational instances, thereby avoiding service interruptions and ensuring continuous operation.

Moreover, load balancers can manage scalability by adding or removing firewall instances based on current network demands, which further supports high availability. They are designed to handle dynamic workloads, making them a key component in creating resilient and highly available network architectures in Azure.

While regular backups and geo-redundant storage are important for data protection and disaster recovery, and network segmentation is vital for security and performance, they do not directly influence the high availability of the firewall itself as effectively as a load balancer does. The role of the load balancer is pivotal in maintaining the active state of the firewall services in the face of potential failures or traffic surges.