Azure Availability Zones are a key part of our continuing expansion of Azure’s support for the most demanding, mission-critical workloads. Today, I’m excited to share the availability and roadmap of Availability Zones support for Azure IoT customers.

Resilience is of critical importance for IoT solutions which often operate in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments where failures or disruptions can have significant consequences. Solutions need to be able to recover from failures and continue to provide reliable and consistent services. Resilience is especially important for IoT solutions that support critical domains including healthcare and local government, where the availability and quality of data can affect critical patient care and public safety.

What are Azure Availability Zones?

Availability Zones provide redundancy for Azure services, enabling tolerance to failures, which can be caused by software and hardware issues or natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and fires. All regions that support this high-availability offering have at least three separate availability zones to ensure resiliency. Each availability zone in Azure has its own power, cooling, and networking infrastructure, and consists of one or more datacenters. A high-performance network with less than 2ms of round-trip latency connects the availability zones. This helps keep your data in sync and available even when there are problems. If one zone is impacted, the other two zones can support uninterrupted delivery of regional services, capacity, and high availability.

Availability Zones in Azure

Azure IoT Hub supports Availability Zones

Over the last few months, the Azure IoT team has enabled support for Availability Zones and continues to expand this support to more regions. All IoT Hub customers in these regions will automatically benefit from more adaptable availability capabilities for their IoT solutions and gain additional resilience without any action required on their part. As of June 2023, the regions indicated below are enabled. Be sure to check Azure IoT Hub’s high availability documentation for the latest updates on our Availability Zone support and other availability improvements for Azure IoT customers.

By the end of calendar year 2023, Azure IoT Hub will enable Availability Zones globally in all Azure regions that support Availability Zones. These improvements represent our commitment to continually improving Azure IoT to meet customer needs.

Links

• What are Azure regions and availability zones? | Microsoft Learn
• Azure IoT Hub high availability and disaster recovery | Microsoft Learn
• Build solutions with availability zones - Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn
• Scale out an Azure IoT solution to support millions of devices - Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn