A rack just lost power. The shop kept selling.
Why Azure places your VMs on different physical racks, and what breaks the moment it does not.
What you'll learn
- What a rack shares — one power feed, one switch, one blast radius
- How an availability set spreads VMs across fault domains for you
- Why two VMs in the same fault domain is not redundancy
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Understand it one step at a time
The short runs these in order in about 53 seconds. Here they are written out — pick any step to jump the short straight to it.
12,000 shoppers. One checkout
A live e-commerce site on Azure, 12,000 shoppers mid-session. Orders are landing normally — nobody is thinking about hardware at all.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a fault domain in Azure?
- A group of hardware — VMs on the same rack sharing one power feed and one network switch — that fails together. Losing the rack's power or switch takes out everything in that fault domain at once.
- Does putting two VMs in an availability set automatically protect them?
- Only if Azure actually places them in different fault domains — two VMs that land in the same fault domain share the same failure, so they aren't redundant with each other even though they're both "in" the set.
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These are built for a phone
Every short is drawn at full portrait height, the shape a phone already is. Installed, it opens full-bleed with no address bar across the top — and the whole library reads offline.
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