In the previous posts, we discussed about what Azure is and how to set up a free account. Let's take a look at the Azure architecture in this blog.
Azure regions and availability zones are designed to help you achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads. Azure maintains multiple geographies. These distinct limits provide boundaries for data residency and disaster recovery across one or more Azure regions.
What is an Azure Geography?
An area of the globe that has one or more Azure Regions is known as an Azure geography. Examples of Azure Geographies include India, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Azure Geography is important for numerous reasons. First, let's say all of your customers are in the US. You don't want to host your application somewhere in the United Kingdom. You don't want every request and the associated data travelling around the world. This causes unnecessary latency, delay and hence, poor performance. You want your application and data to be hosted as geographically close to your customer base as possible. Since all our customers are in the US, you want to make sure, your application and data is hosted in the US. One way Azure ensures this is by using geographies.
Another reason is compliance with regulations. Regulated data like financial, health care or credit card data may not be allowed to leave the country. Legally, your business might be required to keep these records in the nation where the operations are being run. By employing geography, Azure once more makes sure of this.
Regions -
An Azure region is a set of datacenters deployed within an interval-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. Because of this design, Azure services in every region provide the highest level of security and performance.
With more global regions than any other cloud provider, Azure allows clients the freedom to deploy apps wherever they are needed With discrete pricing and service accessibility. At the time this article was written, Azure was accessible in 60 regions.
As a end user we do not have access to all 60 regions, because there are some requirements to be able to have them enabled. So some of the regions are purposely backup regions and we have to have
services running in the primary region in order to get access.
Azure Sovereign Regions -
Certain regions are dedicated to specific sovereign entities. While all regions are Azure regions, these sovereign regions are completely isolated from the rest of Azure, are not necessarily managed by Microsoft, and may be restricted to certain types of customers. These sovereign regions are:
- Azure China
- Azure Germany (being deprecated in favor of standard non-sovereign Azure regions in Germany)
- Azure US Government
- Australia
Note: two regions in Australia are managed by Microsoft, but are provided for the Australian government and its customers and contractors, and therefore carry client constraints similar to the other sovereign clouds
Region Pairing -
Region Pairing is one of the redundancy features that Azure provides. Within the same geography, each Azure region is associated with a nearby region. This pairing will lessen the impact of widespread interruptions on the entire region. The paired zone is situated at least 300 miles apart to provide low latency for data replication, yet close enough to be physically connected to be protected from small-scale calamities. To reduce downtime and the chance of service interruptions, maintenance updates are also staggered out between pairs. When there is a significant outage, Microsoft will give one region in each pair priority so that services can be restored as soon as feasible.
Here is a list of a few of the Microsoft Azure Region Pairs.
Availability zones -
Azure availability zones are physically separate locations within each Azure region that are tolerant to local failures. Failures can include everything from hardware and software issues to natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and fires. Tolerance to failures is achieved because of redundancy and logical isolation of Azure services. All availability zone-enabled regions have a minimum of three distinct availability zones to provide resiliency.
A high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2ms connects Azure availability zones. When things go wrong, they keep your data synchronized and accessible. Each zone consist of One or more datacenters with separate power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. The purpose of availability zones is to ensure that even if one zone is compromised, the remaining two can still provide regional services, capacity, and high availability. Compared to conventional single or multiple datacenter infrastructures, Azure availability zones are more scalable, fault tolerant, and highly available.
Each data center is assigned to a physical zone. Physical zones are mapped to logical zones in your Azure subscription. Azure subscriptions are automatically assigned this mapping at the time a subscription is created. You can use the dedicated ARM API called: checkZonePeers to compare zone mapping for resilient solutions that span across multiple subscriptions.
Azure regions with availability zones -
The largest global presence of any cloud service, Azure is introducing new regions and availability zones quickly. Every country where Azure runs a datacenter area has an Azure availability zone. Availability zones are presently supported in the following areas.
To conclude, Microsoft offers datacenters that are logically organized into regions depending on their geographic locations. These Azure Regions offer Microsoft Azure's capabilities and services, enabling you to deploy them close to your user base. In order to guard against regional outages and localized disasters, Azure Regions are linked for additional redundancy.
We will review the additional features offered by Microsoft Azure in further blog posts.
Thank you for reading!
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