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Cloud Computing & DevOps vocabulary · Cloud Basics and Service Models

Availability zone

Meaning in cloud computing & devops, with examples

nounCommon term

In cloud computing & devops, availability zone means: One of several separate data center locations inside a cloud region, each with its own power and network, so a failure in one should not affect the others.

In Turkish: erişilebilirlik alanı, kullanılabilirlik alanı, AZ

How it is used

Usually shortened to AZ. Engineers spread servers 'across multiple AZs' to survive a data center failure. AWS and Azure use 'availability zone'; Google Cloud simply says 'zone'.

Example sentences

  1. The database has a standby copy in another availability zone, so it survived the power failure.

  2. All our nodes were in a single availability zone, which was a big mistake.

Common collocations

  • across availability zones
  • multi-AZ
  • single availability zone
  • zone failure
  • regionA geographic area where a cloud provider has a group of data centers, such as Frankfurt or Ireland. You choose the region where your resources run.
  • high availabilityDesigning a system so that it stays up almost all the time, with no single part whose failure can stop the whole service.
  • redundancyHaving extra copies of servers, network links, disks or data, so that the system keeps working if one of them fails.
  • failoverSwitching automatically or manually to a standby system, such as a database replica or a second region, when the main one fails.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Cloud Basics and Service Models

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