AZURE Availability Zones

AZURE Availability Zones

Azure Availability Zones are separate data center units that protect your applications and data from data center failures. Each of these data center units features its own power, cooling, and networking. When you run your applications on multiple availability zones, your applications are more resistant to failure or disruption in the primary data center. To ensure this resilience, all enabled regions feature a minimum of three separate zones. These zones allow you to run two isolated copies of your applications.

A typical region is a complex web of data centers, each located hundreds of miles away from the others. Presently, there are 54 Azure regions spread across 140 countries. The size of an Azure region is vast, almost equal to a city block filled with multiple buildings. Each Zone-redundant Services Of these buildings represent the availability zones. To ensure Azure regions function seamlessly, availability zones are essential.

Any given availability zone is a blend of a fault domain and an update domain. Irrespective of the Virtual Machines (VMs) you create, each of the VMs will be effectively distributed across an equal number of fault domains and update domains. A VM can be replicated across two or more availability regions. The Azure platform ensures that VMs in different zones are scheduled not to be updated simultaneously.

Here, you have the flexibility to decide whether the VM will be part of an Availability Set (AS) or an Availability Zone (AZ). The former does not provide redundancy across multiple availability zones, whereas the latter offers various zone redundancy. Zone-redundant services replicate your applications and data across Azure zones to protect from single points of failure. With availability zones, Azure provides a high 99.99% VM uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement).

Azure services that support Availability Zones are broadly classified into two categories:

Zonal Services is where a resource, standard IP addresses, virtual machines, or managed desks is only attributed to a specific zone.

Zone-redundant Services these services came into the picture when the Azure platform replicated itself automatically across zones.

To ensure business continuity on Azure, it is advisable to build the application architecture of your business using a combination of availability zones. You also need to consider Azure region pairs. You can also choose to replicate your applications and use availability zones within a region for high availability. This would give you excellent disaster recovery protection. Do note that not every region has support for availability zones. Some availability zones are Central US, East US 2, West US 2, France Central, North Europe, West Europe, and South-East Asia.

Marco van Dam

IT Area Lead Cloud CAM (IPC) at ING

3 年

Nice read Marcel Koert

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