AZ-104 Stormwind Studio Certification Course Notes

Day 3.1 - Azure Object Hierarchy - Physical

A region is a geographical area on the planet that contains at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network
Regions, Products, and Services Operate within a Region and certain technologies can be strategically architected to span regions

Availability Zones - physically separate datacenters within an Azure region
Each datacenter within an Availability zone has independent:
- Power
- Cooling
- Networking
Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks
Example:
- Azure Region
  - Availability Zone 1
  - Availability Zone 2
  - Availability Zone 3
Availability zones provide
High Availability
Low Latency
Primarily used for:
- VMs, Managed Disks, Load Balancers, SQL Databases and Azure Services the Support Availability Zones
There are currently 3 main categories for Availability Zone Utilization
- 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, such as Entra ID

Region pairs
- Where available Azure regions are paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away
- Provide Disaster resistant High Availability
- Replication across Region Pairs is not automatic