What is an Availability Zone?
If you're in the market for public cloud services, then it's important to understand availability zones. It's very likely that your organization has a footprint in a hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, Google) today. Statista estimates that 60% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. It's estimated that the global hyperscale market is expected to grow to $693 billion by 2026. Chances are, you utilize one of these solutions today, and current market trends indicate that your consideration of these tools will only increase over time. Since hyperscalers will continue to be a viable option for you into the future, let's discuss one of the terms you commonly hear.
Availability Zones (ZAs) are the isolated data centers that you find in each region. Simply, these are the building blocks, or the physical presence, from which your services originate and operate. It is common to select an Availability Zone due to compliance needs and the location in respect to your users (think edge computing). In these Availability Zones (AZs) you'll find multiple data centers, with independent power, cooling and networking infrastructure for business continuity purposes. As you launch your services, you can select your region, which is the geographical location, and availability zone. Often there are multiple Availability Zones per region to select from.
Best practice would suggest that you host your data in multiple Availability Zones (AZs). This distribution will provide business continuity in case of a failure.
AWS
Amazon has 27 regions with 87 availability zones.
Microsoft
MSFT has 60 regions with 116 availability zones.
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Google has 34 regions with 103 availability zones.
If you're curious about which hyperscaler is right for you, we can perform a low or no cost cloud readiness assessment to determine the best fit for your workloads. Let's custom design the solution that meets your requirements.
Y'all be good,
DB