Azure regions, availability zones, and region pairs - Learn

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• A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network.

• Resources are created in regions

• global Azure services that don't require you to select a particular region, such as Azure Active Directory, Azure Traffic Manager, and Azure DNS.

• US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa and more: These regions are physical and logical network-isolated instances of Azure for U.S. government agencies and partners. These datacenters are operated by screened U.S. personnel and include additional compliance certifications.

• China East, China North, and more: These regions are available through a unique partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet, whereby Microsoft doesn't directly maintain the datacenters.

• Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region.

• availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters

• Zonal services: You pin the resource to a specific zone

• Zone-redundant services: The platform replicates automatically across zones (for example, zone-redundant storage, SQL Database).

• Non-regional services: Services are always available from Azure geographies and are resilient to zone-wide outages as well as region-wide outages.

• minimum of three zones within a single region

• Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away

• Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.

• specialized regions

• compliance or legal purposes

• US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa and more

• China East, China North, and more

• 21Vianet

• geographies and availability zones.

• highly available through availability zones