John Savill’s Technical Training explains how Azure subscription availability zones map to physical datacenters and align across different subscriptions, featuring a PowerShell script walkthrough.

Understanding Azure Availability Zone Mappings for Subscriptions

In this video, John Savill provides a practical overview of how Azure Availability Zones (AZs) within a given subscription are mapped to the actual physical datacenters in a region and how this mapping may differ or align across different subscriptions. This guidance is essential for architects and engineers planning for redundancy, disaster recovery, and high availability in Azure.

Topics Covered

  • AZ Refresher: A brief overview of what Availability Zones are in Azure and why they matter for resiliency and planning (00:13).
  • AZ Alignment Between Subscriptions: Explanation of how the logical representation of AZs in one subscription may map to different physical datacenters compared to another subscription, and why this is important (01:52).
  • Script Walkthrough: Step-by-step walkthrough of the Read-AzureAZs.ps1 PowerShell script, which can be used to analyze AZ mappings within your subscription (04:02).
  • Demo: Live demonstration of using the script to examine AZ mapping in the eastus and westus2 Azure regions (08:20).

Script Usage Example

. .\Read-AzureAZs.ps1 read-azureazs eastus, westus2

This PowerShell script, available on GitHub, allows users to inspect how their subscription’s AZs are mapped and aligned.

Key Documentation

Additional Learning

Final Notes

  • For questions, the author recommends posting on community forums like Reddit or Microsoft Community Hub, as direct responses are not possible due to channel size.
  • Subtitles and automatic translations are available for broader accessibility.

This content is tailored for Azure practitioners and architects interested in advanced knowledge of cloud infrastructure resilience, AZ alignment, and scripting. Authored by John Savill.