What is the difference between Availability Zones and Regions in Microsoft Azure Cloud?

Question

I am studying about microsoft Azure. Not able to understand difference between availability zones and regions.

Answer 1

Actually azure has the doc to describe the details about what's Availability Zones.

Firstly check: What are Availability Zones in Azure?

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.

In another doc explains what's regions.

A region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.

Answer 2

Azure Availability zone

An availability zone is one or more data centers that are independent of another (power, water, natural disasters). An availability zone could have 1, 2, 3, or a million data centers. Usually, 3 is a good number: since data can be replicated to the other 2 in case of failure, you still have more than one data center operating. But you can see Availability zones with any number of data centers. The more data centers, the more resilient against shutdowns. What it can be a little bit confusing, is that an availability zone is not a physical location per se as a datacenter, but a latency-defined perimeter.

Azure Region

Now scale that up. Imagine those datacenter are connected directly from one to the other, by low latency connections. AKA: private cable network.

Each Azure region features datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter. They're connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. This design ensures that Azure services within any region offer the best possible performance and security.

Look at this graph:

Now, a region that has more availability zones, is more resilient than one with fewer availability zones.

Azure Geography

It is an area with one or more Azure Regions—for example, India, the United States, United Kingdom.