Microsoft is making generally available Azure Availability Zones, starting in two regions — Iowa (US Central) and Paris (France Central).
Availability Zones are meant to help protect customers from datacenter-level failures. The zones are located inside Azure regions and offer independent power source, networking and cooling. There are a minimum of three separated zone locations in enabled regions.
Availaibility Zones are one of three levels of resiliency Microsoft is providing with Azure. Availability Sets are meant to protect against failures — both hardware and software update cycle — within datacenters. Availability Zones are meant to protect from entire datacenter failures. Region Pairs are meant to protect within data-residency boundaries.
