This is Part 3 of Azure Tutorial. In our previous video, we discussed Azure Data Centers. In this
video, we'll discuss Azure Geographies. An azure geography is an area of the world that contains
at least one azure region. For example, India is a geography. Similarly, United States and
United Kingdom are geographies. As of this course recording, the following are the azure geographies
available. As you know, azure is growing at a very rapid pace, so by the time you watch this course,
there might be a lot more geographies available. Most geographies correspond to countries like
India, United States, United Kingdom, Canada etc. Some geographies like Africa, Australia and Europe
correspond to continents. Some geographies like Asia Pacific for example, correspond to a specific
region. We also have a geography called Azure Government. This geography is only available
to the United States federal, state, local and tribal governments and their partners. It's not
available for general public use. As you might have already guessed, yes azure government offers
the broadest level of certifications. So, even the most critical government compliance requirements
are met. This geography is specifically for US government use. So, all of its operations
are controlled obviously by screened and cleared US citizens. Why are azure geographies important?
Well, regulated data like financial, health care or credit card data for example,
may not be allowed to leave the country. Legally, your organization is required to store such data
in the same country where the operations are being carried out. So, if you select a geography
like India for example, azure ensures your data is not stored outside of India. Similarly if
you select United States, the data stays inside the states. You have complete control on which
geographies you want your data and applications to be deployed. You can be assured, Microsoft will
not store customer data outside the geography you specify, except for certain non-regional services.
Now, you can find all the available azure geographies at this URL. This is the azure
geographies web webpage. I'll have this link available in the description of this video.
If we scroll a bit down, we see the world map here and all the available azure regions
and availability zones. We'll discuss what these are in our upcoming videos,
but if we scroll a bit more down, at the moment I'm recording this video from London,
United Kingdom. So, this webpage is smart enough to recognize that and selected United Kingdom as
the geography. if we take a look at this drop down list, we see the list of all geographies that we
have just seen on the slide. Next to this drop down list , we have this check box "Sow nearby
geographies". As this checkbox is checked, we also see all the geographies nearby to United Kingdom
like Switzerland, Spain, Poland etc. As you can see, in the United Kingdom geography, we have two
regions "UK South" and "UK West". We'll discuss, what azure regions are, in our upcoming videos.
"UK South" region is in London and "UK West" in Cardiff. We also have "Year opened", "Availability
zones", again, we will discus availability zones in our upcoming videos. Next, we have the
"Compliance offerings" and then "Data residency". So, if I select "United Kingdom" as the geography,
my data is guaranteed to be stored within United Kingdom and then we have products by region. So,
one important point to keep in mind here, is not all azure products and services are available in
all regions. Again, we'll talk about azure regions in detail in our upcoming videos. So,
in simple terms, an azure geography is an area of the world that contains one or more
azure regions. Azure region is a very important concept, because,
every time you create an azure resource like a virtual machine for example, you need to specify
the region where you want the resource, that is in this case, the virtual machine to be created.
An azure region may also be paired up with another azure region and there are several
benefits of this pairing. An azure region may also have an availability zone. So all these,
azure regions, paired region and availability zones, are very important concepts and we'll
discuss them in detail in our upcoming videos. That's it in this video. Thank you for listening.