
Software configuration errors like the one behind Monday's Teams outage are a far more frequent culprit. Most of its current regions with availability zones are in rich countries.Īvailability zones can't prevent all outages. Going forward, all new Microsoft cloud regions will also have availability zones at launch, which should help bridge the cloud-services digital divide.This week, after rolling out availability zones within 11 of its more than 60 cloud regions since 2018, Microsoft said that every country in which it operates will have at least one region that offers availability zones by the end of 2021.They've been a standard part of AWS since 2008. Microsoft introduced its first availability zones within two cloud regions (Iowa and Paris) three years ago.That has contributed to the market's perception (backed up by actual incidents) that its cloud is more brittle than the ones operated by its rivals. Microsoft has been much slower than its rivals to roll out availability zones. Cloud customers have to design their applications to take advantage of multiple availability zones, but once they do, they significantly increase the resiliency of those apps.Each availability zone has separate networking and electrical power facilities, with the goal of preventing something like the OVH incident a few weeks ago, where a fire caused by an electrical issue in one data center actually took out four data centers.Here's how AWS defines it: "AZs are physically separated by a meaningful distance, many kilometers, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other." Availability zones are data center buildings, or collections of buildings, that are spaced out within a given region.Microsoft actually offers the largest number of distinct regions across the Big Three. All cloud providers offer their services out of "regions" spread throughout the world.Here's why availability zones are important, and what you need to know about them. It's a delayed recognition of modern cloud architecture by a company that built its first data center in 1989. That's why Wednesday's announcement that Microsoft will make availability zones standard for new cloud regions around the world is significant, and not just because the company suffered a widespread hours-long outage on Monday.
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Microsoft's embrace of the cloud will go down as one of the most successful strategic shifts in software history, but it takes a long time and a lot of money to get the battleship pointed in the right direction.
