In a move designed to enhance the resilience of Azure, Microsoft has introduced Azure Availability Zones. The announcement was made in a blog post by Tom Keane, Head of Global Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure.
In the post Keane states:
“As part of our commitment to providing customers with a platform for their most demanding, mission-critical workloads, I’m excited to announce expanded capabilities for Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure. Starting today, customers can begin using Azure Availability Zones in preview to build highly available applications. Availability Zones increase Azure’s resiliency capabilities and broaden options for customers to choose the business continuity solution that is right for their organization. We've also designed Availability Zones to give customers great confidence in delivering services and with an industry-leading, financially-backed 99.99% virtual machines uptime SLA when generally available.”
Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. Two Availability Zones are now in preview, ‘East US 2’ in Virginia and ‘West Europe’ in the Netherlands, with plans to offer preview to additional regions in the US, Europe, and Asia before the end of the year.
More details at http://aka.ms/az
