Region: A of data centers deployed within a specific geographic area, connected through a low-latency network. Example Central US.
Availability Zones: Availability zones are separated group of datacenters within a single region. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. Availability Zones are connected through high-speed, private fibre-optic networks. Note not every region has support for Availability Zones.
Geography: A defined area of the world containing one or more Azure regions that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries. Example Asia Pacific & US.
Paired Region: Two Azure regions within the same geography paired together for disaster recovery and data replication. Example Central US paired with East US 2
Sovereign Regions: Azure regions isolated from the global Azure cloud to meet specific government or regulatory requirements (e.g., Azure Government, Azure China).
| Geography | Region Name | Physical Location | Availability Zone # | Paired Region |
| US | Central US | Iowa | 3 | East US 2 |
| US | East US | Virginia | 3 | West US |
| US | East US 2 | Virginia | 3 | Central US |
| Geography | Region Name | Physical Location | Availability Zone # | Paired Region |
| Asia Pacific | Central India | Pune | 3 | South India |
| Asia Pacific | Jio India Central | Nagpur | Not supported | Jio India West |
| Asia Pacific | Jio India West | Jamnagar | Not supported | Jio India Central |
| Asia Pacific | South India | Chennai | Not supported | Central India |
Availability Set: A logical grouping of VMs that ensures they are distributed across multiple fault and update domains to reduce downtime.
Fault Domain: It is a PHYSICAL grouping of Datacenters resource like Storage, Network, switch etc. Fault domains concept is mainly use to prevent from Single Point of failure of underlying shared resource like Storage array, network switches, power unit, rack etc. So, it is advisable to deploy your applications across multiple fault domains for maximum uptime.
Update Domain: : It is a LOGICAL grouping of Datacentre resource. However, update domain mainly used in Plan Down (but in some case unplan as well for security patch or cyber-attack) time to deploy / patch security update on underlying physical infra of the data centre. So, it is advisable to deploy your applications across multiple Update domains for maximum uptime.
