Instaclustr is pleased to announce the General Availability of Azure Availability Zones (Azure AZ) support for all products on our managed platform. Azure AZ enabled-regions are widespread across Azure geographies, providing customers with resilience without latency degradation, and developers a greater precision of availability zones when provisioning nodes.
Azure AZ’s have a minimum of 3 separate availability zones in all availability zone-enabled regions (see below for a list of availability zone-enabled regions). Azure AZs are designed for resilience, so regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining 2 zones when 1 zone is affected. Azure AZs is an excellent fit for distributed databases or streaming data services, like Apache Cassandra® and Apache Kafka®. Compared to Azure Fault Domains, Azure AZ’s allow precise control over the placement of individual nodes, rather than the errors created when fault domains try to infer the best placement for distributed resources.
Vinfred Solomon | VP Instaclustr Technology Operations “Azure’s regions provide customers with resilience and disaster recovery, but it was not easy to get the right balance for the cluster when provisioning nodes across fault domains. 3 node clusters in Azure regions required manual review when replacement nodes were provisioned. Provisioning new nodes required a significant effort from my team to do a manual health check as nodes were added, to verify that the new nodes were created in the correct fault domain. Having Azure AZ simplifies our management operations, providing Azure customers with quicker and more reliable service and also making it easier to align with fault tolerance designs for customer apps.”
Instaclustr’s automated tooling, like advanced node replacement, is enhanced by the ability to provision nodes into specific Azure AZ’s. The explicit control to choose the Azure AZ eliminates the overhead of administrative health check operations to ensure that Azure fault domains have the right balance of node distribution when provisioning nodes. This saves manual effort and strengthens the reliability of the operations on our managed platform.
For customers with existing Azure clusters running, both Azure and Azure AZ providers will be available for the life of your Azure cluster. Customers will no longer see the Azure provider once the current clusters are migrated to the Azure AZ provider. Our Support team will contact you to discuss the transition of clusters from Azure to Azure AZ.
Customers not currently running any Azure clusters will see the Azure AZ provider and immediately create your clusters on our console with the Azure AZ provider.
Here is a complete list of Azure regions that support Azure AZ. Below is a list of Azure AZs supported on the Instaclustr platform. Additional Azure AZ-enabled regions can be added on request, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our Support team if there are additional regions that you need support on our platform for your clusters.
| Americas* |
- Canada central
- Central US
- East US
- East US2
- South Central US
- West US 2
|
| Europe* |
|
| Africa |
|
| Asia Pacific* |
- Australia East
- East Asia
- Southeast Asia
|
Customers can start provisioning new Azure AZ clusters today on the Instaclustr console, API, or Terraform provider. Otherwise, our Support team can assist customers with migrating your existing clusters from Azure to Azure AZ.
For more details on Azure AZ, please reach out to our support team.
