Azure adds Availability Zones, promises 99.99 uptime SLA

Microsoft Azure announced the expansion of Availability Zones into two additional regions, North Europe and West US 2.

The company also announced an expanded list of zone-redundant services including Azure SQL Database, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Application Gateway, VPN Gateway, and ExpressRoute.

AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity applications that require a rapid failover. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected to national backbone networks via local telecom carriers’ high-speed fiber-optic networks

Azure offers a 99.99 percent uptime SLA when virtual machines are running in two or more Availability Zones in the same region.

Microsoft said this expanded coverage enables customers operating in the Europe and Western United States to build and run applications that require low-latency synchronous replication with protection from datacenter-level failures. With the combination of Availability Zones and region pairs, customers can create a comprehensive business continuity strategy with data residency in their geography of choice.

Azure’s global footprint consists of 54 regions with more than 100 datacenters serving customers in over 140 countries. Microsoft’s overall strategy is to ensure that customers have broad options for ensuring business continuity. Availability Zones offer additional resiliency capabilities for customers to build and run highly available applications. Azure, with more global regions than any other cloud provider, has been designed to provide first-class resiliency.