Azure Availability Zones and Regions
Azure is backed up by large datacenters interconnected into a single large network. The datacenters are grouped together, based on their physical proximity, into Azure regions. For example, datacenters in Western Europe are available to Azure users in the West Europe region. Users cannot choose their preferred datacenter. They can select their Azure region and Azure will allocate an appropriate datacenter.
Choosing an appropriate region is an important architectural decision as it affects:
- The availability of resources
- Data and privacy compliance
- The performance of the application
- The cost of running applications
Let's discuss each of these points in detail.
Availability of resources
Not all resources are available in every Azure region. If your application architecture demands a resource that is not available in a region, choosing that region will not help. Instead, a region should be chosen based on the...
