Availability Zones

• One or more datacentres within an Azure region equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking that use availability sets to provide additional fault tolerance.

• Availability zones are typically connected to each other through very fast, private fibre-optic networks.

• Used to build high-availability into your application architecture.

• Azure services that support Availability Zones fall into two categories: - Zonal services – Pin the resource to a specific zone, e.g. virtual machines, managed disks, IP addresses. - Zone-redundant services – Platform replicates automatically across zones, e.g. zone-redundant storage, SQL Database.