In my previous blog, I discussed about Azure Stack software (Azure Stack To Bring The Agility & Rapid Innovation ) & how it is actually delivering truly-consistent hybrid cloud deployment which is cost effective and provides the benefits of cloud computing on-premises environment.

One of the most important factor while designing any mission-critical application within a region is to ensure maximum resilience and high availability. You may deploy multiple sets & service availability architectures but still your service will be as highly available as single unit if they have common points of failure. What one requires is that each set has their own resources such as power & networking, to ensure one set does not affect the other. Availability Zones as part of Preview from Microsoft helps provide these features.

There used to be region-specific control to host the resources on Azure services previously. However, with the concept of Availability Zones, preferred zones within a region can be decided to host the resources

Understand Azure Availability Zones Azure has recently introduced Availability Zones (AZ).

Each Azure Availability Zone is a separate datacenter within a region with its own independent resources.

Each AZ has its own independent power source, network, and cooling. Every region will have at least three AZ for better performance. They offer various benefits, including:

• Higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures
• Protects mission-critical application and data from datacentre failures
• Microsoft offers 99.99% SLA for virtual machines deployed in two or more AZs within a region once the service is made in General Availability(GA).
• Very low latency between different AZs within a region
• Physical separation of AZs within a region protects application and data from zero-level failures

With 42 announced regions worldwide (more than any other Cloud provider) and backed by one of the largest networks on the planet, Azure services offer the scale needed to bring applications closer to users and customers around the world.

Availability Zones are now in preview in two regions: East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands, with plans to offer preview to additional regions in the US, Europe, and Asia before the end of the year.

Limited Azure services are being supported wit AZ such as:

• Linux Virtual Machines
• Windows Virtual Machines
• Zonal Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Managed Disks
• Load Balances

Microsoft Azure is a Cloud platform that provides both low-level infrastructure and higher level Cloud services that make it possible to run virtually any application in an elastic, scalable, and redundant hosted environment. Low-level Cloud Azure services are those infrastructure building block services that developers or IT administrators use to host, store, and run multi-tier applications. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the primary low-level public Cloud service that provides an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. The beauty of IaaS for most customers is decreased expense and complexity of managing physical servers and datacenter infrastructure. In fact, with IaaS, it is possible to package up a line of business application, along with any supporting databases, and migrate to Microsoft Azure IaaS with very little friction.