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Availability Zones

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Warning

Azure Media Services will be retired June 30th, 2024. For more information, see the AMS Retirement Guide.

Azure Media Services uses Availability Zones, providing fault-isolated locations within the same Azure region. Media Services is zone-redundant by default in the available locations and no extra configuration on the account is required to enable this capability. Media Services stores media data in the associated storage account(s). These storage accounts should be created as zone-redundant storage (ZRS) or Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) to provide the same level of redundancy as the Media Services account. For details on how to configure replication on the associated storage account(s), see the article Change how a storage account is replicated.

How Media Services components handle an Availability Zone fault

Component Behavior on Availability Zone fault
Control Plane (Azure Resource Management) Continues to work as normal
Key delivery Continues to work as normal
Jobs Jobs are rescheduled in another Availability Zone. There will be a delay in processing time as in-flight processing jobs are rescheduled to start over in the Availability Zone
Live Events Streaming and ingest to the live event continues to work as normal. Calling "reset" on a Live Event is currently not supported during an Availability Zone fault. First, stop and restart the live event as a replacement for the "reset" operation. If a live event was transitioning from to the "Running" state during a zone down event, customers may see the live event stuck in the "starting" state. In this case, start a new live event and clean up the "starting" live events after the zone recovers.
Streaming Endpoints Continues to work as normal

High Availability Streaming and Encoding for VOD

Availability Zones increase the fault-isolation in a single region. To provide high availability for on-demand streaming and encoding you can use other Azure services to create an architecture that covers concerns like redundancy, health monitoring, load balancing, and data backup and recovery. One such architecture is provided in the High Availability with Media Services Video on Demand article. The article and sample code provides a solution for how individual regional Media Services accounts can be used to create a high availability architecture for your VOD application.

Media Services support for Availability Zones by region

Availability Zones are currently only supported in certain Azure regions. To learn more about Availability Zones region support, see Azure Regions with Availability Zones

Further reading

To learn more about Availability Zones, see Regions and Availability Zones in Azure.

To learn more about High Availability encoding and streaming, see High Availability with Media Services Video on Demand.

To learn how to properly configure storage account replication to support Availability Zones, see Change how a storage account is replicated.

Get help and support

You can contact Media Services with questions or follow our updates by one of the following methods: