Availability Zones:
- Azure Availability Zones are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region. Each zone is designed to be independent of the others in terms of power, cooling, and networking. This isolation helps protect applications and data from potential datacenter-level failures.
- Azure Zonal Service might refer to a service that is specifically designed to leverage or operate within a single Availability Zone for increased fault tolerance.
Zone-Redundant Service:
- Zone Redundancy typically means that a service is configured to operate across multiple Availability Zones within a region. This setup ensures high availability and fault tolerance by distributing resources across different physical locations.
- For example, if a virtual machine or storage account is configured for zone redundancy, instances of that resource are deployed in multiple availability zones, and traffic is automatically redirected to a healthy instance in case of a failure.
Non-Regional Service:
- Azure services are generally associated with specific Azure regions, which are geographic locations around the world where Azure resources are hosted. A Non-Regional Service might refer to a service that doesn't tie to a specific Azure region.
- Some services, especially global services like Azure Active Directory, operate across regions, providing a consistent experience for users and applications regardless of their geographic location.