Quick Tip: List Azure datacenter for Compute Services available in the same region
Scenario: If you have two IIS servers behind a load balancer you would want one of them to be available in case of a failure. Availability sets and availability zones are a good way to ensure VM’s do not run on the same rack, power supply and storage in a Microsoft Data center. Availability zone makes sure that the VMs run in different data center within the same region. (Microsoft may have 1 or more data center in the same region). This information is available in the public domain and very well documented in the Microsoft documents (Availability options for Azure Virtual Machines – Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Docs). Microsoft link for Services that support Availability Zones Azure Services that support Availability Zones | Microsoft Docs
This tip here is to go a step beyond. How do you know if there are more than one data center in a region and what services, SKU’s are available in more than one region? If you run the following command (filtered for Australia East, remove the where clause or replace with region of interest) it helps you find out what SKU’s are supported in which availability zone in a region
Get-AzComputeResourceSku | where {$_.Locations.Contains("australiaeast")};Sample output
The below screenshot indicates how many zones are available for the resource types, capacity limits and restrictions in the “Australia East” location.
