Azure Physical Infrastructure
Full-Access Members Only
Sorry, this lesson is only available to Server Academy Full-Access members. Become a Full-Access member now and get instant access to this and many more premium courses. Click the button below and get instant access now.
Instructions
Q&A (0)
Notes (0)
Resources (0)
Saving Progress...
Resources
There are no resources for this lesson.
Notes can be saved and accessed anywhere in the course. They also double as bookmarks so you can quickly review important lesson material.
In this lesson, you will learn about the core architectural components of Azure, focusing on the physical infrastructure. Understanding these components is crucial for designing resilient and reliable solutions on Azure.
Physical Infrastructure
The physical infrastructure for Azure starts with datacenters. Conceptually, Azure datacenters are similar to large corporate datacenters, featuring resources arranged in racks with dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. However, Azure's global cloud provider status means it has datacenters around the world, grouped into Azure Regions or Azure Availability Zones to ensure resiliency and reliability for business-critical workloads.
Datacenters
Azure datacenters are facilities with resources arranged in racks, featuring dedicated power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. These datacenters are not directly accessible and are grouped into larger organizational units known as regions and availability zones.
Regions
A region is a geographical area that contains at least one, but potentially multiple, datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network. Azure intelligently assigns and controls resources within each region to ensure workloads are appropriately balanced. When deploying resources in Azure, you often need to choose the region where you want your resource deployed. Some services or virtual machine (VM) features are only available in specific regions.
Availability Zones
Availability zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. They act as isolation boundaries; if one zone goes down, the others continue working. Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks. To ensure resiliency, a minimum of three separate availability zones are present in all availability zone-enabled regions.
Using availability zones can help make your applications highly available. You can co-locate your compute, storage, networking, and data resources within an availability zone and replicate them across other availability zones. Keep in mind that there could be a cost associated with duplicating your services and transferring data between zones.
| Azure Region | Availability Zone #1 | Availability Zone #2 | Availability Zone #3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| A geographical area with multiple datacenters | Independent datacenter with its own power, cooling, and networking. Ensures redundancy. | Another independent datacenter for redundancy and high availability. | Third independent datacenter to further enhance resilience and fault tolerance. |
Region Pairs
Most Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography, at least 300 miles apart. This approach allows for resource replication across a geography to reduce the likelihood of interruptions due to natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages affecting an entire region. If one region in a pair is affected, services automatically fail over to the other region.
Examples of region pairs include West US paired with East US and South-East Asia paired with East Asia. The primary advantages of region pairs include prioritized restoration during extensive outages, minimized downtime during planned updates, and compliance with data residency laws.
| Geography | Region Pair | Azure Region #1 | Azure Region #2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large geographical area (e.g., US, Europe, Asia) | A pair of regions within the same geography | Contains multiple datacenters and availability zones | Another region within the same geography, ensuring redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities |
Sovereign Regions
Azure also has sovereign regions, which are isolated from the main instance of Azure for compliance or legal purposes. These regions include:
Server Academy Members Only
Sorry, this lesson is only available to Server Academy Full Access members. Become a Full-Access Member now and you’ll get instant access to all of our courses.
