Architecture, Compute & Networking

A geographical area containing one or more datacenters that are networked together and managed as a single unit.

Because the region determines where your resources physically run, affecting latency, data residency/compliance, and feature/service availability.

A region pair is two regions in the same geography (usually 300+ miles apart) linked for replication and disaster recovery to reduce the chance both fail simultaneously.

Updates are rolled out to only one region in the pair at a time, so the paired region remains available during the maintenance.

A sovereign (isolated) region is physically and logically separated from the main Azure cloud for compliance/legal reasons, such as Azure Government (US) or Azure operated by 21Vianet (China).