In this video-blog, we are about to cover Microsoft Azure’s most important concepts like Azure Availability Zones, Region, Availability Set, Fault Domain, and Update Domain In Azure, and how it plays a key role in Virtual Machines. Show
Note: Also read our previous blog on What is Resource Group and How to Create Resource Group. The basic Architecture of the Azure can easily be understood by the following diagram
Azure RegionA region is a set of data centers deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. With more global regions than any other cloud provider, Azure gives customers the flexibility to deploy applications where they need to. Azure is generally available in 52 regions around the world, with plans announced for 6 additional regions.  Also read: Everything you need to know on Azure SQL Database List of Azure regions with availability zonesAzure provides the foremost extensive global footprint of any cloud provider and is rapidly opening new regions and availability zones. the subsequent regions currently support availability zones.
Microsoft Azure Data Center LocationsMicrosoft Azure currently has 59 regions operative and an additional 19 under development, meaning that the corporate will have a complete of 78 regions available within the near-term. Within each Azure region are 1 to three unique physical locations, referred to as availability zones, which provide high uptime to safeguard data and applications from data center failures. Presently, Microsoft Azure has 113 availability zones operational and an additional 51 under development, meaning that the corporate will have a complete of 164 availability zones existing within the near-term. Each Microsoft Azure availability zone is created from one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. The physical separation of availability zones within a neighborhood protects applications and data from facility-level disruptions. Benefits of a Direct Connection to Azure Locations
What is Region Pairing?The reason I start here is that Azure contains a feature that’s unique among the large three cloud providers. It’s the concept of “region pairing.” Region pairing is that the relationship between two Azure regions within an identical geographical area to supply geographically redundant solutions. Azure’s paired regions are prewired with high bandwidth connectivity between them. Azure operates in several geographies worldwide, and within given geography or geopolitical boundary, each region is deployed together with another paired region. Some exceptions exist, like Brazil, which is paired with South Central US, but these are edge cases. So, for instance, in the US, Microsoft pairs Virginia (called East US 2) with Iowa (called Central US). So, if you’re in East US 2 and a disaster recovery (DR) failover has to occur, you’re still within inexpensive proximity to your secondary region and warranted of a high level of service from a latency perspective. Contrast this with the first Virginia region, East US, which pairs with West US (California), and you’re faced with a far higher latency should your environment have to failover. Region Pairs
Also check: Steps to register Azure Free Account GeographiesGeography is a discrete market, typically containing two or more regions, that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries. It allows customers with specific data-residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close. However, they are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to our dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure. To know more about the Geography locations refer here Also check: Step by Step instructions to install Azure Powershell module
To achieve comprehensive business continuity on Azure, build your application architecture using the combination of Azure Zones with Azure region pairs. Also read: Complete Guide on AZ 103 Exam Azure Availability Set
An Update Domain and Fault Domain is assigned to each VM in Availability Set by Azure platform. To know more about the az 104 Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam. Click here Availability Set vs Availability ZoneAvailability Sets takes the virtual machine and configures multiple copies of it. Each copy is isolated within a separate physical server, compute rack, storage units and network
switches within one datacentre within an Azure Region. The next level of availability for your virtual machines within Azure is Availability Zones. With Availability Zones utilised your acceptable downtime a month moves to but 5 minutes as you’ve got a 99.99% SLA. With Availability Zones, you’re setting out to use zone-aware services. Your workload is opened up across the various zones that compose an Azure region. An Azure region is formed from multiple datacentres and every zone is formed from one or more datacentres. Each datacentre is provided with independent power, cooling and networking. When should I use an Available Zone vs Set?When building your workload in Azure it’s important you concentrate on carefully how you’re to create availability in your virtual machine infrastructure. There are some factors you ought to consider when choosing whether to use availability sets or zones. Cost When creating an availability zone there’s a further bandwidth cost for data moving into and out of a zone. it’s however quite minimal, at around 1 pence per GB, but it quickly builds up with workloads that have a high data churn. Storage Where availability zones support managed disks, availability sets don’t directly. This doesn’t mean that managed disks that are attached to VMs in availability sets don’t seem to be as available, they’re still provisioned in such how that they’re isolated from one point of failure. Whereas in the availability zone, a duplicate of that managed disk is found inside each zone. Availability As availability sets and availability zones are two different services, they both include different SLA (service level agreements). The SLA is defined as a percentage, as specifies the guaranteed uptime of your compute or service. This doesn’t include your application or overall workload, but the underlying azure service running it. Where availability sets guarantee a 99.95% uptime, availability zones guarantee a 99.99% uptime. Although this doesn’t appear to if much, this (on paper) is the difference between around 5 hours of cumulative downtime over one year compared to under 1 hour of cumulative downtime. Microsoft Azure’s regions vs. Amazon Availability ZonesFor most customers, the differences between these approaches won’t matter an excessive amount of, says Jared Wray, former CTO of CenturyLink’s cloud and now an entrepreneur. He says the foremost common deployment method for enterprise apps migrating to the cloud is to host them in one region and back it up to a different (an active-passive setup). In AWS’s case, is done to bushed one region across two AZs. In Microsoft or Google’s case, another region would be used. Cloud providers offer ok latency across their regions for many workloads, Wray says. Where AZ’s shine, he notes, is that if you wish a low-latency backup or an active-active backup. AZs within the identical region have fast dedicated connections, which are ideal for these apps. AZs include some downsides though, Wray adds. If an AZ has an outage, many purchasers have designed their workloads failover to a different AZ in this same region. If all of the purchasers within the downed AZ transfer workloads to the healthy AZ, that would theoretically create a crowded AZ, which could impact performance. To help alleviate this issue, cloud vendors are continually adding new regions. Just this month Amazon launched a replacement region in Ohio to assist offload capacity from its Virginia region and satisfy increased demand for its services. Microsoft brought on two new government regions this month too. At the tip of the day, for many customers, the AZ vs. region debate will likely not be a deciding factor in which cloud provider to travel with. sure enough customers, it may well be an enormous factor reckoning on how latency-sensitive the backup of the app must come online. Either way, it’s certainly are a few things to a minimum remembering. Azure Fault Domains
Azure Update Domain
Check Out: What is Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set? How many Fault Domains and How many Update Domains we can have?
Key Points To Remember
Check Out: Azure load balancer vs Application Gateway: know their major differences! SLA(Service Level Agreement) for VM:
Also Read: Our previous blog post on Azure Blob Storage. Click here Hope the blog will help you in understanding the concepts of Region, Availability Zone, Availability Set, Fault Domain, and Update Domain, and how it plays a key role in Virtual Machines. Now it’s your turn to post your doubts in the comment section. Related/References
Next Task For YouBegin your journey towards becoming a Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert. Just click on the register now button below to register for a Free Class on Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert Certification [AZ-305], which will help you to understand better, so you can choose the right path and clear the certification exam. Can we move existing VM to an availability set?A VM can only be added to an availability set when it is created. To change the availability set, you need to delete and then recreate the virtual machine.
Which availability method that protects VMs from multiple az within same region?Azure Storage redundancy
Azure Storage always stores multiple copies of your data so that it is protected from planned and unplanned events, including transient hardware failures, network or power outages, and massive natural disasters.
Can you change the location of an Azure VM?Azure does not support changing a VM's location. You need copy the VM's VHD to another location and use that VHD to create a new VM. If you don't use current VM's VHD to create multiple VMs in other location, you don't need generalize your VM.
Are availability zones available in all regions?Not all Regions have Availability Zones. Regions that support Availability Zones have a minimum of three separate zones to ensure resiliency. If one of the Availability Zones has gone down for some reason, we still have our applications and data available from the rest of the two Availability Zones.
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