As we continue our journey with Microsoft Azure, you will frequently come across terms like Regions, Availability Zones, Resources, and Subscriptions. Today, we focus on the basic building blocks of Azure, dividing our discussion into two main parts: the physical infrastructure and the management infrastructure.
Physical infrastructure
The physical infrastructure for Azure starts with datacenters. Conceptually, the datacenters are the same as large corporate datacenters. They’re facilities with resources arranged in racks, with dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.
As a global cloud provider, Azure has datacenters around the world. However, these individual datacenters aren’t directly accessible. Datacenters are grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones that are designed to help you achieve resiliency and reliability for your business-critical workloads. This network of data centers forms the core of Azure’s physical infrastructure, providing the essential resources — processing power, storage space, and robust connections — that power your cloud applications.
The Global infrastructure site gives you a chance to interactively explore the underlying Azure infrastructure.
Regions
To ensure optimal performance and cater to diverse customer needs, Azure meticulously organises its data centers into geographic regions. Think of a region as a well-connected neighbourhood within the broader cloud city. Each region comprises one or more data centers linked by a high-speed, low-latency network. When you deploy resources, like virtual machines or databases, in Azure, you choose a specific region, similar to choosing a neighbourhood that best suits your needs. Here are some factors to consider when selecting a region:
- Data Privacy: Some countries have laws that require data to be stored within their borders. Choosing a region in your country ensures your data stays local and complies with regulations.
- Speed: The distance between your users and your cloud resources significantly impacts application performance. If your users are mainly in Europe, for example, selecting a European region will provide faster response times compared to an Asian region.
- Service Availability: While Azure offers a wide range of services globally, some might have limited availability in certain regions. Checking regional availability ensures you have access to the specific services you need to run your applications.
Azure Geography
- US
- US Government
- Canada
- Brazil
- Mexico
- UK
So I am from the UK and let’s imagine there are some govt policies that my data should not leave the country so I can chose the UK region and the data will never leave the UK soil.
Availability Zones
For enhanced reliability and to safeguard against unexpected events, Azure further subdivides regions into Availability Zones. Imagine these zones as separate data centers within the same region, each with its own independent power source, cooling system, and dedicated network infrastructure. This physical separation provides a critical layer of redundancy. If an outage or disruption occurs within one zone, the remaining zones continue to function seamlessly. This ensures that your applications remain operational even during localised incidents, minimising downtime and keeping your business running smoothly.
Important
To ensure resiliency, a minimum of three separate availability zones are present in all availability zone-enabled regions. However, not all Azure Regions currently support availability zones.
Use availability zones in your apps
You want to ensure your services and data are redundant so you can protect your information in case of failure. When you host your infrastructure, setting up your own redundancy requires that you create duplicate hardware environments. Azure can help make your app highly available through availability zones.
You can use availability zones to run mission-critical applications and build high-availability into your application architecture by co-locating your compute, storage, networking, and data resources within an availability zone and replicating in other availability zones. Keep in mind that there could be a cost to duplicating your services and transferring data between availability zones.
Availability zones are primarily for VMs, managed disks, load balancers, and SQL databases. Azure services that support availability zones fall into three categories:
- Zonal services: You pin the resource to a specific zone (for example, VMs, managed disks, IP addresses).
- Zone-redundant services: The platform replicates automatically across zones (for example, zone-redundant storage, SQL Database).
- Non-regional services: Services are always available from Azure geographies and are resilient to zone-wide outages as well as region-wide outages.
Even with the additional resiliency that availability zones provide, it’s possible that an event could be so large that it impacts multiple availability zones in a single region. To provide even further resilience, Azure has Region Pairs.
Region pairs
Most Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away. This approach allows for the replication of resources across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions because of events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages that affect an entire region. For example, if a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, services would automatically fail over to the other region in its region pair.
Important
Not all Azure services automatically replicate data or automatically fall back from a failed region to cross-replicate to another enabled region. In these scenarios, recovery and replication must be configured by the customer.
Examples of region pairs in Azure are West US paired with East US and South-East Asia paired with East Asia. Because the pair of regions are directly connected and far enough apart to be isolated from regional disasters, you can use them to provide reliable services and data redundancy.
Additional advantages of region pairs:
- If an extensive Azure outage occurs, one region out of every pair is prioritised to make sure at least one is restored as quickly as possible for applications hosted in that region pair.
- Planned Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions one region at a time to minimise downtime and risk of application outage.
- Data continues to reside within the same geography as its pair (except for Brazil South) for tax- and law-enforcement jurisdiction purposes.
Important
Most regions are paired in two directions, meaning they are the backup for the region that provides a backup for them (West US and East US back each other up). However, some regions, such as West India and Brazil South, are paired in only one direction. In a one-direction pairing, the Primary region does not provide backup for its secondary region. So, even though West India’s secondary region is South India, South India does not rely on West India. West India’s secondary region is South India, but South India’s secondary region is Central India. Brazil South is unique because it’s paired with a region outside of its geography. Brazil South’s secondary region is South Central US. The secondary region of South Central US isn’t Brazil South.
Not all the services are available in all the regions. There are 2 types of regions:
- Recommended Region: A region that provides the broadest range range of service Which means the majority of services will be available in the zone.
- Alternate(other) Region: A region that extends Azure’s footprint whithin a data residency boundary where are recommended region also exists. Not designed to support availability zones. These regions are label as other in the Azure portal
General Availability(GA): is when a service is considered ready to be used publicly by everyone. Azure Cloud services are grouped into 3 categories:
The category determines when a cloud services become available:
- Foundation; When GA, immediately or in 12 months os Recommended and Alternate Region
- Mainstream when immediately or in 23 months in Recommended regions, may become available in alternate regions based on customer demand
- Specialised: Available in Recommended or Alternate Region based on customer demand.
Sovereign Regions
In addition to regular regions, Azure also has sovereign regions. Sovereign regions are instances of Azure that are isolated from the main instance of Azure. You may need to use a sovereign region for compliance or legal purposes.
Azure sovereign regions include:
- US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa and more: These regions are physical and logical network-isolated instances of Azure for U.S. government agencies and partners. These datacenters are operated by screened U.S. personnel and include additional compliance certifications.
- China East, China North, and more: These regions are available through a unique partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet, whereby Microsoft doesn’t directly maintain the datacenters.
Case Studies for Azure Physical Infrastructure
Case Study 1: High Availability E-commerce Platform with Retail Giant XYZ
Challenge: Retail giant XYZ operates a large e-commerce platform that experiences significant traffic spikes during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Downtime during these periods translates to lost sales and a tarnished customer experience.
Solution: XYZ leverages Azure Regions and Availability Zones to ensure high availability and scalability for its e-commerce platform. The platform is deployed across multiple regions, ensuring geographically distributed redundancy. Additionally, within each region, resources are placed across Availability Zones to minimise the impact of localised outages. This multi-layered approach ensures the platform remains operational even during peak traffic periods, maximising uptime and customer satisfaction.
Benefits:
- Reduced Downtime
- Improved Scalability
- Enhanced Customer Experience
Case Study 2: Disaster Recovery for Global Financial Services Company ABC
Challenge: Financial services company ABC operates globally and needs a robust disaster recovery plan to safeguard its critical financial data. A natural disaster or major outage in one region could have severe consequences for the company’s operations.
Solution: ABC utilises Azure Region Pairs to establish a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy. The company’s resources are replicated across paired regions, ensuring geographically isolated backups. In the event of a disaster impacting one region, ABC can seamlessly failover to the paired region, minimizing data loss and downtime.
Benefits:
- Improved Business Continuity
- Enhanced Data Protection
- Reduced Recovery Time
Case Study 3: Building a Compliant Cloud Environment for Government Agency DEF
Challenge: Government agency DEF has strict data residency regulations and requires a secure cloud environment to manage sensitive citizen data.
Solution: DEF utilises Azure Government cloud, a physically and logically isolated instance of Azure specifically designed for government agencies. This ensures data remains within the country’s borders and complies with data residency regulations. Additionally, DEF leverages Availability Zones within the government cloud to build redundancy and minimize downtime for its critical applications.
Benefits:
- Enhanced Data Security
- Compliance with Regulations
- Improved Resilience
Thank you for reading! Let’s connect on LinkedIn.
