What are regions, availability zones, and region pairs | Azure Fundamentals(Az-900) Part-4

Regions

A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one but potentially multiple data-centers that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Cloud Providers intelligently assigns and controls the resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced.

When you deploy a resource on Cloud, you'll often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed.

Why are regions important?

Regions give you the flexibility to bring applications closer to your users no matter where they are. Global regions provide better scalability and redundancy. They also preserve data residency for your services.

Availability zones

Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an region. Each availability zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. An availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.

Region pair

Each region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources (such as VM storage) across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions because of events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages that affect both regions at once. If a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, for instance, services would automatically failover to the other region in its region pair.