What the announcement of Azure Availability Zones means for users

Microsoft recently announced general availability of Availability Zones in Azure, as part of an effort to safeguard both applications and data centers against failures. Availability Zones are physical locations within an Azure region, equipped with backup power, cooling and networking. Three separate zones are available across the region for resiliency.

Capabilities for customers

"This is a great addition for Azure and will give customers more confidence in deploying mission critical workloads in the cloud," says Rob Curls, solutions consultant with Concerto Cloud Services. "Azure Availability Zones will allow customers to deploy workloads not only across fault domains (separate racks, servers, and networks within a datacenter) but across multiple datacenters within a region," he adds. According to Microsoft, when two or more VMs are deployed across two or more Availability Zones, users can reach over 99% uptime.

Availability Zones include two categories of support, including zonal services, in the form of virtual machines, managed disks, and IP address as well as zone-redundant services, which allow the platform to duplicate across storage or a SQL database.

Availability for users

For now, Availability Zones are only supported in the US Central and France Central Azure zones, for non-government users. However, other regions such as East US 2, West Europe and Southeast Asia are currently in preview.

"Customers and partners deploying in these regions can start taking advantage of Availability Zones on new workloads being deployed, or go back and update existing configurations to have greater availability," says Curls. He recommends users check their region and learn whether Availability Zones are available, in preview or anticipated at any point in the future.