Microsoft to launch Azure Availability Zone in Melbourne

Microsoft has announced it will launch a new Azure Availability Zone (AZ) in Melbourne to improve infrastructure redundancy in the vendor’s Australia Southeast data centre region.

The zone is Australia’s second after the Australia East Azure Availability Zone in Sydney, which was launched in 2020 to help distribute cloud resources across three physically separate locations around the city.

Azure Availability Zones are physically and logically separated data centres with their own independent power source, network and cooling systems. Each region has a minimum of three availability zones to allow users to run two isolated copies of their applications.

Microsoft will also open an Azure Availability Zone in the New Zealand DC region, which is called New Zealand North (Auckland).

“[Azure Availability Zones] help organisations better protect their applications and data from infrastructure risks, ranging from technical software issues, hardware failures and natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and fires,” Microsoft’s announcement read.

“By expanding our AZ capabilities to our Australia Southeast (Melbourne) and upcoming New Zealand North (Auckland) regions, customers will have multiple low latency and high resiliency cloud locations, and more choices for managing their workloads in the Microsoft Cloud.”

The vendor said the Australia Southeast region has grown significantly since it launched in 2014 alongside the Australia East region in Sydney, and now encompasses multiple data centres across metropolitan Melbourne.

The region currently offers Azure Backup services, premium storage (99.9 percent uptime SLA), Availability Sets (99.95 percent uptime SLA) and region failover options, and the AZ is expected to bolster the resilience by offering a 99.99 percent financially backed uptime guarantee.

In the announcement, Woolworths head of technology Ducas Francis said, “The needs of our business and our customers are constantly changing, which requires Woolworths’ technology infrastructure to be scalable, agile and resilient.”

“Microsoft’s new Azure Availability Zones in the Australia Southeast region will further support our efforts to innovate in the cloud and simplify work for our teams in order to deliver exceptional customer experiences across our network of stores and online channels.”

Also quoted was NAB chief technology officer Steve Day, saying, “Resilience is the foundation of everything we do in technology, underpinning our ability to provide our customers with great banking experiences.”

“Microsoft’s investment in additional Azure Availability Zones in Melbourne will enable us to deploy critical applications into the Australia Southeast region.”

[Correction: this article originally stated that Microsoft would open an Azure Availability Zone in Auckland in its NZ Central data centre region. This was incorrect - the region is called New Zealand North (Auckland). The article has been corrected.]