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Reliability: AZ overview update
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articles/reliability/availability-zones-overview.md

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---
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title: What are Azure availability zones?
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description: Learn about availability zones and how they work to help you achieve reliability
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description: Learn about availability zones and how to use them to design resilient solutions.
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ms.service: azure
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ms.subservice: azure-availability-zones
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ms.topic: conceptual
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ms.date: 11/22/2024
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ms.date: 01/29/2025
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ms.author: anaharris
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author: anaharris-ms
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ms.reviewer: asinghal
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ms.custom: references_regions, subject-reliability
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ms.custom: references_regions, subject-reliability, ai-video-concept
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---
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# What are availability zones?
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Many Azure regions provide *availability zones*, which are separated groups of datacenters within a region. Availability zones are close enough to have low-latency connections to other availability zones. They're connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than approximately 2 ms. However, availability zones are far enough apart to reduce the likelihood that more than one will be affected by local outages or weather. Availability zones have independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. They're designed so that if one zone experiences an outage, then regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining zones. They help your data stay synchronized and accessible when things go wrong.
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>[!VIDEO https://learn-video.azurefd.net/vod/player?id=d36b5b2d-8bd2-43df-a796-b0c77b2f82fc]
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Many [Azure regions](./regions-overview.md) provide *availability zones*, which are separated groups of datacenters within a region. Each availability zone has independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure, so that if one zone experiences an outage, then regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining zones.
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Availability zones are connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than approximately 2 ms. They are close enough to have low-latency connections to other availability zones, but are far enough apart to reduce the possibility of more than one being affected by a localized outage, such as a power failure or a storm.
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Datacenter locations are selected by using rigorous vulnerability risk assessment criteria. This process identifies all significant datacenter-specific risks and considers shared risks between availability zones.
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To see which regions support availability zones, see [Azure regions with availability zone support](availability-zones-region-support.md).
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## Zonal and zone-redundant services
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<a name='zonal-and-zone-redundant-services'></a>
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## Types of availability zone support
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Azure services can provide two types of availability zone support: *zone-redundant* and *zonal*. Each service might support one or both types. When designing your reliability strategy, make sure that you understand how each service in your workload supports availability zones.
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- **Zone-redundant deployments**: Zone-redundant resources are replicated or distributed across multiple availability zones automatically. For example, zone-redundant data services replicate the data across multiple zones so that a failure in one zone doesn't affect the availability of the data. For some services you can select the set of zones that your resource uses, while in other services Microsoft selects the zones.
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When you deploy into an Azure region that contains availability zones, you can use multiple availability zones together. By using multiple availability zones, you can keep separate copies of your application and data within separate physical datacenters in a large metropolitan area.
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With zone-redundant deployments, Microsoft manages spreading requests across zones and the replication of data across zones. If an outage occurs in an availability zone, Microsoft manages failover to another zone automatically.
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There are two ways that Azure services use availability zones:
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- **Zonal deployments**: A zonal resource is deployed to a single, self-selected availability zone. This approach doesn't provide a resiliency benefit, but it helps you to achieve more stringent latency or performance requirements. For example, virtual machines, managed disks, and standard IP addresses can be deployed zonally to the same zone.
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- **Zone-redundant** resources are spread across multiple availability zones. Microsoft manages spreading requests across zones and the replication of data across zones. If an outage occurs in a single availability zone, Microsoft manages failover automatically.
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To improve the resiliency of zonal resources, you need to design an architecture with separate resources in multiple availability zones within the region, but Microsoft doesn't manage the process for you. If an outage occurs in an availability zone, you're responsible for failover to another zone.
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- **Zonal** resources are pinned to a specific availability zone. You can combine multiple zonal deployments across different zones to meet high reliability requirements. You're responsible for managing data replication and distributing requests across zones. If an outage occurs in a single availability zone, you're responsible for failover to another availability zone.
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Some services don't use availability zones until you configure them to do so. If you don't explicitly configure a service for availability zone support, it's called a *nonzonal* or *regional* deployment. Resources configured in this way might be placed in any availability zone in the region, and might be moved. If any availability zone in the region experiences an outage, non-zonal resources might be in the affected zone and could experience downtime.
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Azure services support one or both of these approaches. Platform as a service (PaaS) services typically support zone-redundant deployments. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) services typically support zonal deployments. For more information about how Azure services work with availability zones, see [Azure regions with availability zone support](availability-zones-region-support.md).
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>[!IMPORTANT]
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>Some services may have extra requirements to meet for availability zone support. For example, some may only support availability zones for certain tiers or SKUs, or in a subset of Azure regions.
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Some services don't use availability zones until you configure them to do so. If you don't explicitly configure a service for availability zone support, it's called a *non-zonal* or *regional* deployment. Resources configured in this way might be placed in any availability zone in the region, and might be moved. If any availability zone in the region experiences an outage, non-zonal resources might be in the affected zone and could experience downtime.
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## Configuring resources for availability zone support
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For information on service-specific reliability support using availability zones as well as recommended disaster recovery guidance see [Reliability guidance overview](./reliability-guidance-overview.md).
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Each service has its own method for configuring availability zone support. To learn about how each service supports availability zones and how to configure that support, see [Azure reliability guides by service](overview-reliability-guidance.md).
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## Physical and logical availability zones
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Each datacenter is assigned to a physical zone. Physical zones are mapped to logical zones in your Azure subscription, and different subscriptions might have a different mapping order. Azure subscriptions are automatically assigned their mapping at the time the subscription is created. Because of this, the zone mapping for one subscription could be different for other subscriptions.
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For example: A subscription named "finance" may have physical zone X mapped to logical zone 1, while another subscription named "engineering" has physical zone X mapped to logical zone 3, instead.
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For example, a subscription named "finance" may have physical zone X mapped to logical zone 1, while another subscription named "engineering" has physical zone X mapped to logical zone 3, instead.
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To understand the mapping between logical and physical zones for your subscription, use the [List Locations Azure Resource Manager API](/rest/api/resources/subscriptions/list-locations). You can use the [Azure CLI](/cli/azure/install-azure-cli) or [Azure PowerShell](/powershell/azure/what-is-azure-powershell) to retrieve the information from the API.
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## Availability zones and Azure updates
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For each region, Microsoft aims to deploy updates to Azure services within a single availability zone at a time. This approach reduces the impact that updates might have on an active workload, because the workload can continue to run in other zones while the update is in process. You need to run your workload across multiple zones to take advantage of this benefit. For more information about how Azure deploys updates, see [Advancing safe deployment practices](https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/advancing-safe-deployment-practices/).
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For each region, Microsoft aims to deploy updates to Azure services within a single availability zone at a time. This approach reduces the impact that updates might have on an active workload, allowing the workload to continue to run in other zones while the update is in process. To take advantage of sequenced zone updates, your workload must be already configured to run across multiple zones. For more information about how Azure deploys updates, see [Advancing safe deployment practices](https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/advancing-safe-deployment-practices/).
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## Availability zone architectural guidance
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To achieve more reliable workloads:
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To achieve reliable workloads:
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- Production workloads should be configured to use multiple availability zones if the region they are in supports availability zones.
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- For mission-critical workloads, you should consider a solution that is *both* multi-region and multi-zone.

articles/reliability/availability-zones-service-support.md

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# Azure services with availability zone support
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Azure availability zones are physically separate locations within each Azure region. This article shows you which services support availability zones.
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For more information on availability zones and regions, see [What are Azure regions and availability zones?](availability-zones-overview.md),
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Azure [availability zones](./availability-zones-overview.md) are physically separate locations within each Azure region. This article shows you which services support availability zones.
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Azure is continually expanding the number of services that support availability zones, including zonal and zone-redundant offerings.
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## Types of availability zone support
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Azure services can provide two types of availability zone support: *zone-redundant* and *zonal*. Each service might support one or both types. When designing your reliability strategy, make sure that you understand which availability zone types are supported in each service of your workload.
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- **Zone-redundant services**: Zone-redundant resources are replicated or distributed across multiple availability zones automatically. For example, zone-redundant data services replicate the data across multiple zones so that a failure in one zone doesn't affect the high availability of the data. For some services you can select the set of zones that your resource uses, while in other services Microsoft selects the zones.
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- **Zonal services**: A resource can be deployed to a single, self-selected availability zone to achieve more stringent latency or performance requirements. For example, virtual machines, managed disks, and standard IP addresses can be deployed zonally to the same zone. To achieve resiliency with zonal services, you need to design an architecture with separate resources in multiple availability zones within the region, but Microsoft doesn't manage the process for you.
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Some services don't use availability zones until you configure them to do so. If you don't explicitly configure a service for availability zone support, it's called a *non-zonal* or *regional* deployment. Resources configured in this way might be placed in any availability zone in the region, and might be moved. If any availability zone in the region experiences an outage, non-zonal resources might be in the affected zone and could experience downtime.
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>[!IMPORTANT]
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>Some services may have limited support for availability zones. For example, some may only support availability zones for certain tiers, regions, or SKUs. To get more information on service limitations for availability zone support, select that service in the table.
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## Always-available services
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Some Azure services don't support availability zones because they are:

articles/reliability/regions-overview.md

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ms.topic: conceptual
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ms.date: 01/13/2025
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ms.author: anaharris
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ms.custom: references_regions, subject-reliability
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ms.custom: subject-reliability, ai-video-concept
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# What are Azure regions?

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