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Reliability in Azure Deployment Environments

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This article describes reliability support in Azure Deployment Environments, and covers intra-regional resiliency with availability zones and inter region resiliency with disaster recovery. For a more detailed overview of reliability in Azure, see Azure reliability.

Availability zone support

Azure availability zones are at least three physically separate groups of datacenters within each Azure region. Datacenters within each zone are equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. In the case of a local zone failure, availability zones are designed so that if the one zone is affected, regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining two zones.

Failures can range from software and hardware failures to events such as earthquakes, floods, and fires. Tolerance to failures is achieved with redundancy and logical isolation of Azure services. For more detailed information on availability zones in Azure, see Regions and availability zones.

Azure availability zones-enabled services are designed to provide the right level of reliability and flexibility. They can be configured in two ways. They can be either zone redundant, with automatic replication across zones, or zonal, with instances pinned to a specific zone. You can also combine these approaches. For more information on zonal vs. zone-redundant architecture, see Recommendations for using availability zones and regions.

Availability zone support for all resources in Azure Deployment Environments is enabled automatically. There's no action for you to take.

Regions supported:

  • West US 2
  • South Central US
  • UK South
  • West Europe
  • East US
  • Australia East
  • East US 2
  • North Europe
  • West US 3
  • Japan East
  • East Asia
  • Central India
  • Korea Central
  • Canada Central

For more detailed information on availability zones in Azure, see Regions and availability zones.

Cross-region disaster recovery and business continuity

Disaster recovery (DR) is about recovering from high-impact events, such as natural disasters or failed deployments that result in downtime and data loss. Regardless of the cause, the best remedy for a disaster is a well-defined and tested DR plan and an application design that actively supports DR. Before you begin to think about creating your disaster recovery plan, see Recommendations for designing a disaster recovery strategy.

When it comes to DR, Microsoft uses the shared responsibility model. In a shared responsibility model, Microsoft ensures that the baseline infrastructure and platform services are available. At the same time, many Azure services don't automatically replicate data or fall back from a failed region to cross-replicate to another enabled region. For those services, you are responsible for setting up a disaster recovery plan that works for your workload. Most services that run on Azure platform as a service (PaaS) offerings provide features and guidance to support DR and you can use service-specific features to support fast recovery to help develop your DR plan.

You can replicate the following Deployment Environments resources in an alternate region to prevent data loss if a cross-region failover occurs:

  • Dev center
  • Project
  • Catalog
  • Catalog items
  • Dev center environment type
  • Project environment type
  • Environments

For more information on Azure disaster recovery architecture, see Azure to Azure disaster recovery architecture.

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