The most widely used terminology in Azure is Regions, compare with geographies and zones. we seldom mention datacenters.
1. A new region means the cloud service is ready in that location
Look at the above picture, Microsoft will have South Africa North and West, which means Africa will have Azure Service.
2. Azure products are available by regions
Some of the new products, preview products only availability in certain regions before roll over globally. Most Azure services are deployed regionally and enable the customer to specify the region into which the service will be deployed. Examples of such Azure services include virtual machines, storage, and SQL Database.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/services/
3. Availability Zones
Not all the Azure Regions have AZ. Not all Azure products/Service support Availability Zone.
Availability Zones is a high-availability offering that protects your applications and data from datacenter failures. Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. To ensure resiliency, there’s a minimum of three separate zones in all enabled regions.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/availability-zones/az-overview
Note: the VM-to-VM data transfer between Availability Zones will be charged. See item 9 for details.
4. Datacenters
A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. Also, you can see Availability Zone might also have several datacenters. So region or AZ means there is a datacenter, but it doesn’t means there is only one datacenter.
Azure Data Center Security
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1cyTL8JqRg
Take a video tour inside one of the newest Microsoft datacenters
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/
Microsoft Global Datacenters and Network Infrastructure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5I4wcQ6n0g
5. Region and City
if you want to find out Azure region and the corresponding cities, see this link:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/locations/
6. Region and Pricing
The same product might have different price in different region, for example: you can check different VM price here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/windows/
Find best price by region, please check
https://azureprice.net/
7. Paired Regions
Across the region pairs Azure serializes platform updates (planned maintenance), so that only one paired region is updated at a time. In the event of an outage affecting multiple regions, at least one region in each pair will be prioritized for recovery.
8. Geographies
Azure regions are organized into geographies. An Azure geography ensures that data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geographies/
Another important part of the Geo is “where is customer data”, “Microsoft may replicate to other Regions for data resiliency but Microsoft will not replicate or move customer data outside the Geo”
https://azuredatacentermap.azurewebsites.net/
9. Bandwidth Price
- Inbound traffic to Azure is free, but you will be charged for inbound data for VM deployed in an availability zone.
- Outbound traffic price depends on source region.
- Availability Zone Data Transfer billing will start on May 1, 2019. Usage prior to May 1, 2019 will not be billed
- Data transfer between Azure services located within the same region is free. For example, an Azure SQL database in the same region will not have any additional data transfer costs.
- Data transfer between Azure services located in two regions will be charged as outbound data (Although the traffic might still within Azure backbone network)
10. Zone & Availability Zone
Zone is different from Availability Zone
Zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purpose. Data transfer pricing is based on the Zones.
A sub-region is the lowest level geo-location that you may select to deploy your applications and associated data. For data transfers (except CDN), the following regions correspond to Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3, and DE Zone 1.
- Zone 1—Canada Central, Canada East, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, France South, UK South, UK West, Central US, East US, East US 2, US Gov Arizona, US Gov Iowa, US Gov Texas, US Gov Virginia, North Central US, South Central US, West US, West US 2, West Central US
- Zone 2—East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia Central, Australia Central 2, Australia East, Australia Southeast, Central India, Japan East, Japan West, Korea Central, Korea South, South India, West India
- Zone 3—Brazil South
- DE Zone 1—Germany Central, Germany Northeast
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
Heran on Azure 