Availability Zones
The unit of correlated physical failure, and what zones do not protect against.
3 to work through
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advanced
A marketplace runs across three availability zones in one region. What actually happens when one zone fails, and which common design choices turn a survivable zone failure into an outage?
2 min answer -
advanced
One availability zone becomes unavailable. Walk through what happens to a typical three-tier application and what you would have changed.
2 min answer -
advanced
What is cell-based architecture, what does it actually buy, and how do you decide cell size and routing?
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Availability Zone Independence
The property that a failure in one zone does not propagate to another, and the design work needed to actually benefit from it.
conceptCross-Zone Data Transfer
Charges incurred when data moves between availability zones within a region — invisible on architecture diagrams and a recurring surprise on cloud bills.
conceptZonal vs Regional Services
Whether a cloud resource lives in one availability zone or is inherently spread across several — a property that determines what a zone failure takes…
Neighbouring topics
Cloud Architecture
General material on designing for cloud platforms.
Compute Models
Instances, containers and functions, and what each is priced and shaped for.
Cloud Storage
Object, block and file storage, and the access patterns each suits.
Cloud Databases
Managed relational, key-value, document and analytical services.
Containers
Images, registries, immutability and the deployment model they enable.
Kubernetes
The reconciliation loop, and whether the workload needs what it provides.
Serverless
Scale to zero, per-request billing, cold starts and connection limits.
Autoscaling
Signals, delays and bounds — and the maximum that caps a runaway bill.
Load Balancing
Distributing traffic, health checking, and removing failures from rotation.
Multi-Region Architecture
Surviving a region, and the data consistency price of doing so.
Disaster Recovery
Backup-restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active postures.
Backup Strategies
Scope, immutability, separation, and the restore drill that makes it real.
Infrastructure as Code
Declarative infrastructure, drift, state files and rebuild-from-empty.
Landing Zones
A governed foundation of accounts, network, identity and guardrails.
Managed Services
Which operational responsibilities actually transfer, and which do not.
Cloud Migration
Per-application disposition, sequencing and the capability change underneath.
Multi-Cloud
Best-of-breed, portfolio and portable — three very different costs.
Edge Computing
Moving compute towards the user, and what cannot follow it.
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.