What is Azure Availability Zones?

Azure Availability Zones: Everything you need to know?

Azure availability zones are physically separate locations within each Azure region that are tolerant to local failures. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more data centres with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Features

Let’s check out features and the importance of Availability zones that will help you understand why they are needed.

• Low Latency:

Azure availability zones are connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2ms.

• Availability Zones are not in all Azure regions:

Not all Regions have Availability Zones. Regions that support Availability Zones have a minimum of three separate zones to ensure resiliency. The examples of Availability Zones are Central US, East US 2, West US 2, West Europe, France Central, North Europe & Southeast Asia.

• Highly Available:

Azure availability zones are highly available, fault tolerant, and more scalable than traditional single or multiple datacenter infrastructures. With availability zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically transition between zones without interruption. With Availability Zones, Azure offers industry best 99.99% VM uptime SLA(Service Level Agreement)

Benefits

Let’s check out benefits of Availability zones.

• Fail Proof:

If one of the Availability Zones has gone down for some reason, we still have our applications and data available from the rest of the two Availability Zones. There is a physical separation between each Availability Zone and it is this separation that protects our applications and data from Datacenter failures.

Using availability zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically transition between zones without interruption. Azure availability zones are highly available, fault tolerant, and more scalable than traditional single or multiple datacenter infrastructures.




• Disaster Managements:

Some organisations require high availability of availability zones and protection from large-scale phenomena and regional disasters. Azure regions are designed to offer protection against localized disasters with availability zones and protection from regional or large geography disasters with disaster recovery, by making use of another region. ☑So even if one Azure region gets down, maybe due to some natural calamity or war like situation, your application would still be served from the other region.

Availability Zone vs Availability Set:

Feature	Azure Availability Zone	Azure Availability Set
Scope	An availability zone defends against breakdowns of the whole data center.	An availability set secures your Azure services from outages inside individual data centers.
SLA	Service Level Agreement is 99.999%.	Service Level Agreement is 99.995%.