Microsoft Corp. today said that it will deploy availability zones in all the regions where it maintains cloud data centers to provide Azure customers with increased protection against outages.

The rollout, Microsoft Azure Vice President Pradeep Nair detailed in a blog post today, is expected to be completed by year’s end. 

The data center infrastructure powering Azure is spread throughout dozens of locations around the world. Microsoft refers to each location where it has a cloud infrastructure presence as a region. The additional availability zones it’s building in regions where the technology is not yet deployed will reduce the risk of application outages for customers by providing redundant hardware that can withstand technical issues.

An availability zone consists of at least three separate data centers that provide backup coverage for one another. A company can create three separate copies of an application and run each in a separate facility within the same availability region. If one of the data centers goes offline, the other two can take over to avoid operational disruptions.

Microsoft places the data centers close to another other at a distance that it says ensures connection latencies of less than two milliseconds. That allows availability zones to provide a feature known as synchronous replication. The feature continuously synchronizes information between standby copies of an application running in different data centers, which means no information is lost if the original copy becomes unavailable.

At the same time, the three data centers in an availability zone are located far enough apart that a localized issue can’t take them all offline. “As part of our design process, we utilize more than 30 viability and risk-based criteria to evaluate the placement of each of the three Availability Zones,” Nair explained. 

Over the last 12 months, Microsoft has added availability zones to five data center regions worldwide. Besides extending coverage to all its regions by year’s end, the company today pledged that “all foundational and mainstream Azure services will be AZ-enabled.” That means customers of those services will have the ability to use availability zone resiliency features to ensure their data remains available in the event of an outage.

Microsoft’s top cloud rivals, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC, offer similar capabilities in their respective platform. Microsoft and its rivals moreover enable customers to distribute backup copies of workloads not only within the same region but also across multiple regions for even stronger protection against outages. 

Image: Microsoft