Availability Zone
An isolated data center location within a cloud region designed to provide fault tolerance and high availability.
Also: AZ
Definition
An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data center locations within a cloud provider's region, each with redundant power, cooling, and networking. By distributing applications across multiple AZs, organizations protect against data center failures — if one AZ goes down, others continue serving traffic. AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer multiple AZs per region. High-availability architectures deploy resources across at least two AZs, often with active-active or active-passive failover configurations.
Example
“A web application deployed across 3 AWS Availability Zones continues operating without interruption when a power outage takes one AZ offline.”
Synonyms
- fault domain
- data center zone
- cloud zone
Antonyms / Opposites
- single point of failure
Images
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Related Terms
- high-availability
- cloud-region
- failover
- disaster-recovery