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Regions & Storage

Purpose

Region choice and storage redundancy are decisions you make once per product and live with for years: moving data later is expensive. This page fixes both defaults so projects don't re-debate them: deploy in Sweden Central, and store production data zone-redundantly.

Default region: Sweden Central

Deploy new products in Sweden Central (swedencentral, short code swc) unless a required service isn't available there. In that case, fall back to West Europe.

Reason Detail
EU data residency Data stays within the EU, satisfying most customer compliance requirements
Availability zones Sweden Central has three availability zones, required for the ZRS storage default below
Sustainability One of Microsoft's most sustainable datacenter regions, running largely on renewable energy
Price Compute and storage are generally cheaper than in West Europe
Capacity Newer region with better availability of modern SKUs than the frequently constrained West Europe

Check service availability first

Verify every service of your architecture is available in Sweden Central via Azure products by region before committing. Keep all resources of one product in one region: cross-region traffic costs money and adds latency.

Regions, zones, and pairs in one picture

%%{init: { "flowchart": { "useMaxWidth": true } } }%%
flowchart LR
    subgraph SWC[Region Sweden Central]
        AZ1[Zone 1]
        AZ2[Zone 2]
        AZ3[Zone 3]
    end
    SWC -.->|geo-replication| GAV[Paired Region]

    classDef zone fill:#e3f2fd,stroke:#1565c0
    class AZ1,AZ2,AZ3 zone
Concept What it protects against
Availability zone A datacenter failure: zones are physically separate datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking
Region pair A regional disaster: data is geo-replicated to a second region hundreds of kilometers away

Storage redundancy

Option Copies Survives Use at Plainsight
LRS 3 in one datacenter Rack and drive failures Non-PRD environments
ZRS 3 across availability zones A whole datacenter outage Default for PRD
GRS 3 + 3 in the paired region A regional disaster Only on explicit customer DR requirements
GZRS ZRS + 3 in the paired region Datacenter and regional disasters Only on explicit customer DR requirements

The rule

Production ADLS Gen2 storage accounts use ZRS with hierarchical namespace enabled. LRS is acceptable in non-PRD to save cost. Geo-redundant options are opt-in per customer, not our default: they roughly double storage cost, and data governance may even forbid data leaving the region.

ADLS Gen2 checklist

Setting Value Why
Account kind StandardV2 general purpose The standard for analytical workloads
Hierarchical namespace Enabled Turns blob storage into a real filesystem, required for the medallion lakehouse layout and efficient directory operations
Redundancy ZRS in PRD, LRS in non-PRD See above
Public network access Disabled where possible See Security Fundamentals
Access tier Hot Analytical data is read frequently; use lifecycle rules to cool down aged data

Quick Reference: Do's and Don'ts

Do ✅ Don't ❌
Default to Sweden Central for new deployments Spread one product across multiple regions
Verify service availability before committing to a region Assume every service exists in every region
Use ZRS for production ADLS Gen2 accounts Leave production data on LRS
Enable hierarchical namespace on data lake accounts Enable it on accounts that only serve blobs or queues
Use lifecycle management to tier aged data Pay hot-tier prices for archive data
Reserve GRS/GZRS for explicit DR requirements Default to geo-redundancy "to be safe"