If you have read my articles, you would know by now how critical is the reliability for any application. And how cloud vendors provide multiple options to ensure we can attain the desired uptime SLA for our servers or applications hosted on cloud. Availability set and Availability zones are among those features available for the services hosted on Azure.
These are two key features which can help you make your infrastructure more robust in case of any disaster. In this article I will talk about the use of these features and key differences between the two.
Table of contents:
Availability zones
Azure availability zones are physically separate locations within each Azure region that are tolerant to local failures. Failures can range from software and hardware failures to events such as earthquakes, floods, and fires. Tolerance to failures is achieved because of redundancy and logical isolation of Azure services. To ensure resiliency, a minimum of three separate availability zones are present in all availability zone-enabled regions.
Azure availability zones are connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2ms. They help your data stay synchronized and accessible when things go wrong. Each zone is composed of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. Availability zones are designed so that if one zone is affected, regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining two zones.
Datacenter locations are selected by using rigorous vulnerability risk assessment criteria. This process identifies all significant datacenter-specific risks and considers shared risks between availability zones.
With availability zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically transition between zones without interruption. Azure availability zones are highly available, fault tolerant, and more scalable than traditional single or multiple datacenter infrastructures.
Each data center is assigned to a physical zone. Physical zones are mapped to logical zones in your Azure subscription. Azure subscriptions are automatically assigned this mapping at the time a subscription is created. You can design resilient solutions by using Azure services that use availability zones. Co-locate your compute, storage, networking, and data resources across an availability zone, and replicate this arrangement in other availability zones.
Availability sets
An availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide for redundancy and availability. I recommended that two or more VMs are created within an availability set to provide for a highly available application and to meet the 99.95% Azure SLA. There is no cost for the Availability Set itself, you only pay for each VM instance that you create.
Each virtual machine in your availability set is assigned an update domain and a fault domain by the underlying Azure platform. Each availability set can be configured with up to three fault domains and twenty update domains. Update domains indicate groups of virtual machines and underlying physical hardware that can be rebooted at the same time. When more than five virtual machines are configured within a single availability set with five update domains, the sixth virtual machine is placed into the same update domain as the first virtual machine, the seventh in the same update domain as the second virtual machine, and so on. The order of update domains being rebooted may not proceed sequentially during planned maintenance, but only one update domain is rebooted at a time. A rebooted update domain is given 30 minutes to recover before maintenance is initiated on a different update domain.
Fault domains define the group of virtual machines that share a common power source and network switch. By default, the virtual machines configured within your availability set are separated across up to three fault domains. While placing your virtual machines into an availability set does not protect your application from operating system or application-specific failures, it does limit the impact of potential physical hardware failures, network outages, or power interruptions.
VMs are also aligned with disk fault domains. This alignment ensures that all the managed disks attached to a VM are within the same fault domains.
Only VMs with managed disks can be created in a managed availability set. The number of managed disk fault domains varies by region – either two or three managed disk fault domains per region.
Key difference between Availability set and Availability zones
Azure availability zones-enabled services are designed to provide the right level of resiliency and flexibility. They can be configured in two ways. They can be either zone redundant, with automatic replication across zones, or zonal, with instances pinned to a specific zone. You can also combine these approaches.
Some organizations require high availability of availability zones and protection from large-scale phenomena and regional disasters. Azure regions are designed to offer protection against localized disasters with availability zones and protection from regional or large geography disasters with disaster recovery, by making use of another region.
Deploying VMs in an availability set will not protect an application from failures associated with the operating system of the VMs or from failures that are application-specific. However, placing virtual machines in an availability set will provide protection against network outages, physical hardware failures, and power interruptions within an Azure datacenter.
Availability zones are similar in concept to availability sets. However, there is a distinct difference. While availability sets are used to protect applications from hardware failures within an Azure data center, availability zones, protect applications from complete Azure data center failures.
I should also note here that the virtual machines deployed in an availability zone, will be covered by a 99.99% VM uptime SLA whereas virtual machines placed in availability set will be covered by 99.95% Azure SLA.
The Tech Guy 