The preview of Microsoft Azure in France is open today to all customers, partners and ISVs worldwide giving them the opportunity to deploy services and test workloads in these latest Azure regions. This is an important step towards offering the Azure cloud platform from our datacenters in France.
The new Azure Regions in France are part of our global portfolio of 42 regions announced, which offer the scale needed to bring applications closer to users and customers around the world. We continue to prioritize geographic expansion of Azure to enable higher performance and availability, meet local regulatory requirements, and support customer preferences regarding data location. The new regions will offer the same enterprise-grade reliability and performance as our globally available services combined with data residency to support the digital transformation of businesses and organizations in France.
The new France Central region offers Azure Availability Zones which provide comprehensive native business continuity solutions and the highest availability in the industry with a 99.99% virtual machines uptime SLA when generally available. Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking for higher availability, increased resiliency and business continuity. Starting with preview, customers can architect highly available applications and increase their resiliency to datacenter level failures by deploying IaaS resources across Availability Zones in France Central. Availability Zones in France Central can be paired with the geographically separated France South region for regional disaster recovery while maintaining data residency requirements.
You can follow these links to sign up for the Azure Preview in France, learn more about the Microsoft Cloud in France, or learn more about Azure Availability Zones.