Azure Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region protecting customers’ applications and data from datacenter-level failures. Earlier this year, we announced the general availability of Availability Zones. We are now excited to reveal the continued expansion of Availability Zones into additional regions, North Europe and West US 2. This expanded coverage enables customers operating in the Europe and Western United States to build and run applications that require low-latency synchronous replication with protection from datacenter-level failures. With the combination of Availability Zones and region pairs, customers can create a comprehensive business continuity strategy with data residency in their geography of choice.
Azure’s global footprint consists of 54 regions with more than 100 datacenters serving customers in over 140 countries. Microsoft’s overall strategy is to ensure that customers have broad options for ensuring business continuity. Availability Zones offer additional resiliency capabilities for customers to build and run highly available applications. Azure, with more global regions than any other cloud provider, has been designed to provide first-class resiliency.
In addition to the continued expansion of Availability Zones across Azure regions, we're also excited to announce an expanded list of zone-redundant services including Azure SQL Database, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Application Gateway, VPN Gateway, and ExpressRoute. Learn more about zonal and zone-redundant services.
Azure offers an industry-leading 99.99 percent uptime SLA when virtual machines are running in two or more Availability Zones in the same region. Learn more, and start using Azure Availability Zones today. To learn how to build applications with high availability and disaster recovery, visit the Azure resiliency page.