Regions and availability zones

Teach

Azure's global infrastructure is organized into geographies, regions, and availability zones so you can place workloads for performance, resilience, and compliance.

Geographies and regions

• A geography is a discrete market (often a country/area) that respects data-residency and compliance boundaries. It contains one or more regions.
• A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter, connected by a low-latency network (for example, East US, West Europe).
• You deploy most resources into a region, choosing one close to users or required by compliance.

Availability zones and region pairs

• Availability zones (AZs) are physically separate datacenters within a region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking. Spreading instances across zones protects against a single datacenter failure (high availability).
• Region pairs link each region with another region in the same geography (usually 300+ miles apart). Platform updates roll out sequentially, and some services replicate data across the pair for disaster recovery.

Sovereign clouds

Azure also offers isolated, sovereign clouds separate from public Azure for special compliance needs — for example, Azure Government (US) and Azure China (operated by 21Vianet).

Quick decision checkpoints

1. Need protection from a datacenter outage? Spread across availability zones.
2. Need disaster recovery and data residency? Use region pairs in the right geography.
3. Strict government/national compliance? Consider a sovereign cloud.

Choose geography for compliance, region for proximity, and zones/pairs for resilience.