Microsoft Azure announces the general availability of Availability Zones

To catch up with Amazon, Microsoft announced last year that they will offer Availability Zones for Azure customers. Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of the service starting with select regions in the United States and Europe.

Availability Zones increase Azure’s resiliency capabilities and broaden options for customers to choose the business continuity solution that is right for their organization. We’ve also designed Availability Zones to give customers great confidence in delivering services and with an industry-leading, financially-backed 99.99% virtual machines uptime SLA.

All the major cloud vendors host cloud computing resources in multiple locations world-wide. However, there are differences in the approach to make these resources available to the customers. Amazon for example defines their locations as regions and Availability Zones. Each region is a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. However, Microsoft Azure has been only available from 36 regions around the world (6 more coming soon) and there was no concept of Availability Zones. Customers had to plan in advance according to the vendor and select the appropriate location to store the data. There are some advantages of having Availability Zone in addition to regions, that is why Microsoft is bringing this feature to Azure customers.

Azure Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. This will allow Azure customers to run mission-critical cloud apps with higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures.