Azure IoT Hub service availability zones

Question

We currently have an IoT Hub Service in a region without support for availability zones. I understand what an Availability Zone is, but I'm not sure what the bad consequences for our IoT solution can be if our current region does not support them.

Documentation is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-ha-dr#availability-zones

Answer 1

Hello @Kamil Lucyszyn ,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

Before this can be answered, we need to understand what availability zones are.

Many Azure regions provide availability zones, which are separated groups of datacenters within a region.

So, within one region, several sub-data centers are already available to run the same logic or store the same data at multiple places. This offers eg. redundancy for your services for a better uptime. Because this 'duplicate' is a nearby, the latency is very low, especially compared to a 'sister region'.

Azure IoT Hub also supports availability zones. This is managed on the background so you cannot manage it yourself.

If no availability zone is available, Azure will rely on the more standard geo-paired region for redundancy. This is also called a 'sister region'.

Fail-over situations are normally initiated by Microsoft and is related to a geo-paired region. During that situation, your IoT Hub is not accessible and some data 'in flow' could be gone.

So, what are the consequences of not having availability zones within your region?

Basically, Microsoft cannot rely on redundancy locally (using the availability zones) so the change of having a fail-over to another region is slightly higher. This means the availability is technically a little bit less.

If you still want to migrate to another region, please use a device provisioning service for that. This way, users van seamlessly migrate to another IoT Hub in any region.

---

If the response helped, do "Accept Answer". If it doesn't work, please let us know the progress. All community members with similar issues will benefit by doing so. Your contribution is highly appreciated.