Azure China: Regions and Availability Zones

Azure maintains multiple geographies to anticipate disaster recovery and data residency boundaries across its regions. Maintaining many regions ensures customers are supported across the world. To expand its services, Microsoft decided to bring a new Azure Region to China officially in March 2014 with two initial regions. It expanded it to meet the China market’s growing needs for global public cloud services. When writing this article, Microsoft contains five Azure regions and seven availability zones in mainland China.

Azure China Regions

Microsoft officially launched in March 2014 in two initial regions, Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet was the first international public cloud service that became generally available in the China market. Microsoft’s first two Chinese regions, China East in Shanghai and China North in Beijing launched in 2014. Additional facilities in the same cities, China East 2 and China North 2 opened in 2018. The China North 3 region, released in 2022, is located in Hebei and is Azure’s fifth region in the country which will enable more customers to utilize Microsoft Cloud, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Power BI.

Azure China Availability Zones

Azure availability zones are physically separate locations within each Azure region that are tolerant to local failures. Datacenter locations are selected by using rigorous vulnerability risk assessment criteria. Tolerance to failures is achieved because of the redundancy and logical isolation of Azure services and failures can range from software and hardware failures to events such as earthquakes, floods, and fires.

Along with the new Azure region launched in Hebei, a set of new cloud innovation capabilities will be available in China in 2022 including Azure availability zones, which gives customers an industry-leading 99.99 percent SLA when VMs are running in two or more availability zones. The China regions in Shangai and Beijing offer availability zones with the nearest region with China North 3 zone while the Hebei region offers 3 availability zones. The availability zones in China are designed to provide the right level of resiliency and flexibility.

Azure availability zones in China are highly available, fault-tolerant, and more scalable than traditional single or multiple data center infrastructures. With availability zones in China, Azure can design and operate applications and databases that automatically transition between zones without interruption.

What’s New with the Hebei China Region?

Azure announced new cloud innovation and sustainability for China in March 2022 with the new region:

How Rahi Can Support Businesses Adopt Azure in China

We are a global IT solutions provider that has extensive experience helping businesses adopt Azure in China.
Our team of experts can provide a range of services to support your adoption of the Azure platform, including:

Our team has already helped many western companies successfully adopt and integrate Azure in China, and we can bring that expertise to your business too. With our support, you can leverage the power of Azure to drive your digital transformation and grow your business in China.