Yesterday, Microsoft previewed a new cloud deployment model based on the Azure Resource Manager. A few days earlier, meanwhile, the tech giant announced that it would be holding a free Azure Quantum Developer workshop on February 2.
Today, in a further cloud-related announcement, Microsoft has unveiled the general availability of new Azure Availability Zones for the South Central U.S. region.
For those who are unaware, Azure Availability Zones work as physical locations that contain one or more datacenters utilizing independent power, cooling, and networking systems. Built within Azure regions, the main purpose of these zones is to persevere as an alternative in the case of datacenter failures. A service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% virtual machine uptime further complements their functionality.
With increased resiliency for the Azure South Central U.S. region through this introduction, the new Availability Zones provide the following key features:
- Azure Storage, SQL Database, and Cosmos DB all provide built-in data replication, both within a region and across regions.
- Azure managed disks are automatically placed in different storage scale units to limit the effects of hardware failures.
- Virtual machines (VMs) in an availability set are spread across several fault domains. A fault domain is a group of VMs that share a common power source and network switch. Spreading VMs across fault domains limits the impact of physical hardware failures, network outages, or power interruptions.
- Azure Site Recovery supports customers in disaster recovery scenarios across regions and zones.
Microsoft is confident that its customers for the aforementioned region will now be able to experienced increased service availability, further data storage protection, and additional fault tolerance against datacenter failures.