availability zone
compound.compound. a separate data center or group of data centers in a specific area. Companies use them to keep their websites running even if one center has a power cut or a problem.
compound. an isolated location within a data center region designed to be independent of failures in other zones. Each zone has its own power, cooling, and networking to ensure high availability and fault tolerance for cloud services.
We host our website in more than one availability zone.
To prevent a total system outage, the engineer distributed the database across three different availability zones within the same geographic region.
Architecting for high availability requires deploying redundant resources across multiple availability zones, ensuring that a localized hardware failure or utility disruption does not result in service downtime for the end user.
A compound formed from the noun availability, derived from the Middle French available, and the noun zone, originating from the Latin zona. The term emerged as a standard industry designation within cloud computing architecture to distinguish isolated locations within a geographic region.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Commonly used in cloud computing contexts (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
Last updated July 22, 2026