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What are Azure regions?

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Azure provides over 60 regions globally, that are located across many different geographies. Each region is a set of physical facilities that include datacenters and networking infrastructure. All regions may be divided into geographical areas called geographies. Each geography is a data residency boundary, and may contain one or more regions.

Many regions provide certain types of resiliency options, such as availability zones, region pairs, and nonpaired regions. When you choose a region for your services, it's important to pay attention to the resiliency options that are available in that region. This article helps you understand Azure regions, and gives you an overview of the resiliency options that some Azure regions support, while offering links to more detailed information on each topic.

Understand Azure regions and geographies

An Azure region consists of one or more datacenters, connected by a high-capacity, fault-tolerant, low-latency network connection. Azure datacenters are typically located within a large metropolitan area.

Image depicting high availability via asynchronous replication of applications and data across other Azure regions for disaster recovery protection.

Every region is contained within a single geography that serves as a fixed data residency boundary. If you have data residency requirements, it's important that you select regions within the required geography. Each geography has at least one region equipped with availability zones. For a list of all Azure geographies, see Azure geographies.

Note

Most regions are available to all Azure customers. However, some regions belong to sovereign cloud geographies, which are available to some customers in specific geographic areas with stringent data residency regulations. Sovereign cloud regions work the same way as other regions, however they're often limited in the services and features of services that they provide. For more examples of limited service availability in sovereign cloud regions, see Compare Azure Government and global Azure) or Availability of services for Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

List of regions

Microsoft Azure maintains a dynamic list of all available regions, as well as regional information regarding data residency, availability zone support, and compliance. To see the list of regions, see Microsoft Datacenters Map.

Regional resiliency options

While all Azure regions provide high-quality services such as data residency and latency optimization, they can differ in the types of resiliency options they support.

This section summarizes the two resiliency options that may or may not be available in the regions you choose.

Availability zones

Many Azure regions provide availability zones. Availability zones are independent sets of datacenters that contain isolated power, cooling, and network connections. Availability zones are physically located close enough together to provide a low-latency network, but far enough apart to provide fault isolation from such things as storms and isolated power outages. Most Azure services provide built-in support for availability zones and you can decide how to use them to meet your needs. When you design an Azure solution, you should use availability zones to provide redundancy and fault isolation.

To learn more about availability zones, see What are availability zones?.

Paired and nonpaired regions

Some Azure regions are paired with another Azure region in order to form region pairs. Region pairs are selected by Microsoft and can't be chosen by the customer. There are some Azure services that use region pairs to support geo-replication and geo-redundancy. Some also use region pairs to support aspects of disaster recovery, in the unlikely event that a region experiences a catastrophic and unrecoverable failure.

Many newer regions aren't paired, and instead use availability zones as their primary means of redundancy. Many Azure services support geo-redundancy whether the regions are paired or not, and you can design a highly resilient solution whether you use paired regions, nonpaired regions, or a combination of both.

To learn more about paired and nonpaired regions and how to use them, see Azure region pairs and unpaired regions.

Using multiple Azure regions

It's common to use multiple Azure regions, paired or nonpaired, when you design a solution. By using multiple regions, you can increase workload resilience to many types of failures, and you have many options for disaster recovery. Also, some Azure services are available in specific regions, so by designing a multi-region solution you can take advantage of the global and distributed nature of the cloud.

When you select regions that are geographically far apart, the latency of network connections between those regions increases. Latency can affect how you design a multi-region solution, and it can restrict the types of geo-replication and geo-redundancy you can use. For more information, see Recommendations for using availability zones and regions.

For more information on the Azure services available in each region, see Products available by region.