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Cloud Computing · Foundational

Availability Zone (AZ)

One or more physically separate data centers within a region with independent power, cooling and networking.

Definition

Availability zones are isolated failure domains within a cloud region, connected by low-latency, high-bandwidth links. Deploying across multiple AZs protects applications from data-center-level failures. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud (as 'zones') all use the concept; OCI's equivalent is the availability domain.

Example

Running two web servers in us-east-1a and us-east-1b behind a load balancer.

Exam tip

Multi-AZ protects against a data center failure; multi-region is needed to survive a full regional outage.

Don't confuse it with

Related terms