Azure makes sure that the VMs you place within an Availability Set run across multiple physical servers, compute racks, storage units, and network switches. Protecting the app from a data center outage would (imho) require the distribution of VMs among availability zones. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/availability-zones/az-overview#availability-zones https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/azure/virtual-machines/windows/tutorial-availability-sets