Microsoft is expanding Azure Availability Zones into North Europe and West US. Along with it, the company announced availability of Azure DevOps over Azure ExpressRoute.
With new availability zones, Microsoft aims to provide additional resiliency capabilities to enterprises operating in Europe and Western United States. It will help them build and run applications that need low-latency synchronous replication with protection from datacenter-level failures.
Currently, Microsoft Azure has 54 regions with over 100 datacenters across more than 140 countries.
“Microsoft’s overall strategy is to ensure that customers have broad options for ensuring business continuity. Azure, with more global regions than any other cloud provider, has been designed to provide first-class resiliency,” wrote Tom Keane, Corporate Vice President, Azure Global, Microsoft Azure, in a blog post.
In addition to the expansion of Availability Zones across Azure regions, Microsoft is also expanding list of zone-redundant services. These services include Azure SQL Database, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Application Gateway, VPN Gateway, and ExpressRoute.
The availability of Azure DevOps over Azure ExpressRoute will be helpful for customers operating in government and financial services sectors. It is because they want private connections that don’t go over the public internet for security reasons.
Enterprises will be able to connect to Azure DevOps via the Microsoft peering configuration of ExpressRoute circuits. This functionality was previously available for Microsoft online services like Azure Storage, Azure SQL, and Dynamics 365.
Further, Azure ExpressRoute will provide enterprises faster speeds, more reliability, and lower latencies as compared to typical internet connections.
ExpressRoute is available for all Azure DevOps services, including self-hosted Azure Pipelines agents, self-hosted Cloud Load Test agents, Visual Studio Marketplace, Visual Studio Subscriber Portal, Visual Studio Subscriptions Administration Portal.
It will also be available for organizations using new dev.azure.com and legacy {organization}.visualstudio.com URLs.
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Microsoft said that it wouldn’t be available for Azure DevOps static content that the company delivers via Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN).
