What is Azure Extended Zones?
Azure Extended Zones provides small-footprint extensions of Azure that you can place in metropolitan areas, industry centers or a specific jurisdiction to serve low latency and data residency workloads. It supports virtual machines, containers, storage and a selected set of Azure services, so latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive applications can run close to users and within approved data residency boundaries.
Extended zones are part of the Microsoft global network and provide secure, reliable, high-bandwidth connectivity. Operations use the familiar Azure tooling, so access, user experience, automation and security match the rest of the Azure ecosystem.
Core Features
Split control and data plane: The control plane for the services remains in the parent Azure region while the data plane runs at the extended zone site, producing a much smaller local Azure footprint.
Compute close to users: Azure Virtual Machines in the A, B, D, E and F series plus GPU sizes from the NVadsA10 v5 series, alongside Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Virtual Desktop.
Full Azure networking: Virtual networks and peering, Standard Load Balancer, standard public IP, Private Link, ExpressRoute and DDoS Protection (Standard).
Storage options: Managed disks as premium and standard SSD, premium page and block blobs, premium files, Data Lake Storage Gen2 plus SFTP and NFS support.
Business continuity: Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery from the extended zone to the parent region.
Typical Use Cases
Latency-sensitive applications: Microsoft cites media editing software run remotely but requiring low latency.
Data residency: Application data must stay within a specific geography, for privacy, regulatory or compliance reasons.
Local hosting in regulated industries: Running workloads within approved data residency boundaries while continuing to use Azure operations tooling.
Network-edge security functions: Deploying partner solutions such as firewalls and SD-WAN directly at the extended zone site.
Benefits
- Proximity to end users while retaining access to the Azure ecosystem and tooling
- Data residency within defined geographic or legal boundaries
- Connectivity to the high-bandwidth Microsoft global network
- Familiar Azure resource management through the portal, CLI and ARM
- Reservations and savings plans available through the recommendations flow
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you in evaluating Azure Extended Zones for latency-critical and data-residency workloads: requirements analysis, access request, architecture for splitting workloads between region and extended zone, and operating model.
Contact us for a no-obligation consultation on Azure Extended Zones.
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Azure Extended Zones?
Azure Extended Zones are small-footprint extensions of Azure that you can place in metropolitan areas, industry centers or a specific jurisdiction. They address low latency and data residency workloads and support virtual machines, containers, storage and a selected set of Azure services.
How do I get access to Azure Extended Zones?
Access must be requested. Microsoft describes the procedure in the article 'Request access to Azure Extended Zones'. During that process, a comprehensive list of available extended zones is generated.
How does an extended zone differ from an Azure region?
The control plane for the services remains in the parent Azure region while the data plane is deployed at the extended zone site. This results in a smaller local Azure footprint while retaining connectivity to the Microsoft global network.
Are all Azure services available in extended zones?
No. A defined set of services across compute, networking, storage, business continuity and Azure Arc-enabled PaaS is available. Microsoft continues to expand the list; some services that are generally available in Azure regions are still in preview in extended zones.
Do I manage extended zone resources like other Azure resources?
Yes. You provision and manage resources, services and workloads through the Azure portal and the other standard Azure tools.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Azure (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Azure.
