How can you ensure high availability of your applications in Azure?

Ensuring high availability of applications in Azure involves strategically designing and deploying resources to minimize downtime and maintain performance during disruptions. Using availability sets and availability zones is a key method for achieving this.

When an application is deployed across multiple availability sets, it enhances reliability by distributing virtual machines across physical hardware. This way, if one machine or hardware fails, the other machines can continue to operate and serve traffic, effectively reducing the likelihood of a single point of failure.

Further enhancing this strategy, availability zones provide a higher level of redundancy by allowing deployments across different datacenter locations within the same Azure region. This ensures that even in the event of a datacenter failure, applications remain operational, as the application can failover to resources in another zone.

Scaling resources also plays a crucial role in high availability, as it allows applications to handle variability in load. By automatically adjusting the number of running instances based on demand, applications can maintain performance during peak times while also ensuring that resources are available during lower demand periods.

In contrast, relying solely on Azure Functions would limit the architectural resilience necessary for high availability as serverless functions scale automatically but do not inherently provide the redundancy and infrastructure needed for fault tolerance. Limiting access to applications does not directly contribute to availability; instead, it