Azure Architecture
Azure is made up of data centers located around the globe organized into regions.
A region is a geographical area containing one or multiple data centers that are nearby and networked together with a low-latency network.
Azure regions are organized into geographies. Azure geography ensures that data residency, sovereignty, compliance and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries by specialized regions, such as US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa, China East, China North and more.
Within an Azure region, data centers are physically separated in the Availability Zones as the following diagram.
Each Availability Zone is comprised of one or more data centers with independent power, network, and cooling. It is set up to be an isolation boundary. If one zone goes down, the other continues working.
There are a minimum of three zones in a single region. However, it's possible that a large enough disaster could cause an outage big enough to affect even two datacenters. That's why Azure also creates region pairs.
Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia). This approach allows for the replication of resources across geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions due to events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages...etc
Azure service guarantees
Microsoft provides high-quality products and services by adhering to comprehensive operational policies, standards, and practices. Formal documents called Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) capture the specific terms that define the performance standards that apply to Azure.
An SLA defines performance targets for an Azure product or service. The performance targets that an SLA defines are specific to each Azure product and service.
A typical SLA specifies performance-target commitments that range from 99.9 percent ("three nines") to 99.999 percent ("five nines"), for each corresponding Azure product or service.
SLAs also describes how Microsoft will respond if an Azure product or service fails to perform to its governing SLA's specification. Microsoft categorizes Azure cloud services into more than 18 main product types, let's take so a look at the most used categories:
Summary
In this module, we have learned about Microsoft Azure Architecture (Regions, geographies, availability zones and region pairs) then we have talked about the Azure service guarantees and the formal document Service-Level Agreements (SLAs).