# Key Architectural components of Azure

Azure is a cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft, the cloud is designed to help customers find solutions and build or run applications across multiple clouds, on premises and edge with tools and framework of your choice .

Key Azure component

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1730288334229/8a701110-7dbc-4bdb-a6dd-fd0abbbfe4e2.png align="center")

Availability Zones

These are physically separate locations within an Azure region Each availability zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling and networking.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1730328561565/d4ebc2db-1d03-462e-9fd2-a7bbd80bc063.png align="center")

Azure Regions

In Azure, an availability zone is a physically separate location within an Azure region that is designed to be highly resilient to power outages, network failures, and natural disasters. Each availability zone is made up of one or more data centers that have independent power, cooling, and networking. This allows for the creation of highly available and fault-tolerant applications and services.

Azure services that are deployed in an availability zone are protected from single points of failure and can continue to function even if one of the data centers within an availability zone goes offline.

![Azure-regions](https://media.geeksforgeeks.org/wp-content/uploads/20230801132825/Azure-regions.png align="left")

Azure geography

1. Azure divides the world into geographies that are defined by geopolitical/country boundaries typically containing two or more regions that preserve data residency and compliance boundaries.
    
2. Geographies allow customers with specific data residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close or within geographical boundaries.
    
3. Geographies are **fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure** through their connection to dedicated **high-capacity networking** infrastructure
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1730330134080/e491c451-c04f-4591-8120-ae71718e8349.png align="center")
    
    Availability set
    
4. Azure Availability Set is a logical grouping of multiple Azure virtual machines across the same region and different availability zones by which the availability of virtual machines will be increased and scalability will become very easy. Key features and benefits of using Azure Availability Sets include:
    
    1. Fault Domain Isolation.
        
    2. Update Domain Isolation.
        
    3. High Availability for VMs.
        
    4. Scalability and Load Balancing.
        
    5. Automatic Fault Detection and Recovery.
        
    6. In conclusion, the Azure cloud platform have over 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life, to solve today challenges and create the future, build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.