AZ – Availability Zone – Isolated location within a cloud region.
An Availability Zone (usually) represents a physically separate and isolated data center within a cloud region. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure to ensure high availability. AZs within a region are connected through low-latency links but are isolated enough to prevent failures from cascading between zones. Cloud providers recommend distributing applications across multiple AZs to achieve high availability and disaster resilience. Services like load balancers and auto-scaling groups can automatically distribute workloads across AZs.
