Availability Zone

A physically separate datacenter within a region, with independent power, cooling, and networking.

An Availability Zone is a physically separate datacenter within an Azure region, with its own independent power, cooling, and network infrastructure. Each region that supports zones contains at least three of them, and Azure services built for high availability replicate data and compute across these zones. The key exam distinction is from Availability Sets: zones protect against an entire datacenter failure within a region, whereas Availability Sets only spread VMs across fault and update domains inside a single datacenter. “Zone-redundant” services spread automatically; “zonal” services are pinned to one chosen zone.

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