Microsoft Azure provides a highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective cloud platform by leveraging their Global Infrastructure, which consists of Regions, Region-Pair, Availability Zones.
Azure Region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network (Two or more data center not two far from each other connected with fiber connection)
Each region has one other region which is treated as its “Pair”. Almost always it will be in the same geography (Except Brazil South) due to data storage laws.
Some services used paired regions for replication.
Software rollout / updates are deployed to one region of a pair and the other is not touched.
If multiple regions goes down, one region of each pair is treated as a priority.
Outbound data transfer between azure services located in different region is charged, however inbound data transfer is free.
Azure Availability Zone enables you to define unique physical locations within a region. Each zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking designed to ensure high-availability of your Azure services. Physical separation of Availability Zones within a region protects applications and data from datacenter failures.
Each Availability Zone is a physical location within a region.
Each region has minimum 3 availability Zones.
Each availability zone is independent from other, and has its own power ,cooling and networking
