What is a Cloud Zone?
A cloud zone, also known as availability zone by some cloud providers, is a subset of a region. It represents a distinct and independent data center facility within a region. The purpose of having multiple availability zones within a region is to enhance the availability and fault tolerance of applications and services.
Availability zones are typically connected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networks, but they are physically separate from each other. This separation helps protect against failures in one zone from affecting the others. Applications can be distributed across multiple availability zones to achieve higher availability and reliability.
A local zone is an extension of a cloud zone that offers a subset of standard cloud services that also tend to be more latency sensitive. Local zones are accessible at cloud on-ramp locations.
Cloud zones serve 4 main purposes, which are:
- Compliance
- Customer proximity
- Decrease of latency
- Resource protection