What are Azure Extended Zones (Preview)?
Azure Extended Zones are small-footprint extensions of Azure placed in metros, industry centers, or a specific jurisdiction to serve low latency and data residency workloads. Azure Extended Zones supports virtual machines (VMs), containers, storage, and a selected set of Azure services and can run latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive applications close to end users and within approved data residency boundaries.
Azure Extended Zones are part of the Microsoft global network that provides secure, reliable, high-bandwidth connectivity between applications that run on an Azure Extended Zone close to the user. Extended Zones address low latency and data residency by bringing all the goodness of the Azure ecosystem (access, user experience, automation, security, etc.) closer to the customer or their jurisdiction. Azure customers can provision and manage their Azure Extended Zones resources, services, and workloads through the Azure portal and other essential Azure tools.
Key scenarios
The key scenarios Azure Extended Zones enable are:
Latency: users want to run their resources, for example, media editing software, remotely with low latency.
Data residency: users want their applications data to stay within a specific geography and might essentially want to host locally for various privacy, regulatory, and compliance reasons.
The following diagram shows some of the industries and use cases where Azure Extended Zones can provide benefits.
Service offerings for Azure Extended Zones
Azure Extended Zones enable some key Azure services for customers to deploy. The control plane for these services remains in the region and the data plane is deployed at the Extended Zone site, resulting in a smaller Azure footprint.
The following diagram shows how Azure services are deployed at the Azure Extended Zones location.
The following table lists key services that are available in Azure Extended Zones:
| Service category | Available Azure services and features |
|---|---|
| Compute | Azure Kubernetes Service Azure Virtual Desktop Virtual Machine Scale Sets Virtual machines (general purpose: A, B, D, E, and F series and GPU NVadsA10 v5 series) |
| Networking | DDoS (Standard protection) ExpressRoute Private Link Standard Load Balancer Standard public IP Virtual Network Virtual network peering |
| Storage | Managed disks Premium Page Blobs Premium Block Blobs Premium Files Data Lake Storage Gen2 Hierarchical Namespace Data Lake Storage Gen2 Flat Namespace Change Feed Blob Features - SFTP - NFS |
| BCDR | Azure Site Recovery Azure Backup |
Availability
Currently, Los Angeles is the only available Extended Zone in preview.
Pricing
Currently, resources created in Los Angeles Extended Zone aren't billed. However, any resources you create in the parent region to use with Extended Zone resources are subject to charges. For example, if you create a virtual machine in Los Angeles with a network security group in West US, you'll only be billed for the network security group.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
To get answers to most frequently asked questions about Azure Extended Zones, see Azure Extended Zones FAQ.