We are announcing that Azure will not charge for the data transfer across availability zones regardless of using private or public IPs on your Azure resources. Availability zones allow Azure services to enhance greater resiliency for customers’ cloud infrastructure. With this change, Azure will further encourage and support customers’ efforts in building more resilient and efficient applications and solutions on Azure.
Benefits of Zone Redundant Designs:
- Enhanced Application Resilience: By eliminating data transfer fees between availability zones, we make it easier for customers to design and deploy applications that are redundant across multiple availability zones. This can significantly reduce the risk of downtime and ensure higher availability of their services.
- Simplified Architecture Planning: With this change, customers can more easily architect, design and deploy their applications to take advantage of geographic distribution within a region. This simplifies the decision-making process around where and how to deploy services, as the cost of AZ redundancy is reduced.
- Encouragement of Best Practices: We aim to support customers in adopting the best practice architecture for cloud deployment. Removing cross-AZ transfer costs encourages the use of highly available and fault-tolerant system architectures without additional fees.
- Zonal and Zone-Redundant Services: Customers’ applicationscan benefit from relying on zonal or zone-redundant services without concern over increased costs associated with cross availability zone traffic. Zonal services guarantee zonal isolation, and zone redundant services can survive zonal disruption events. Both types of services provide better reliability for their applications now without additional cross-availability zone data transfer costs in Azure.
