Are all Azure regions alike?

No! As I learned recently, only a handful of regions feature multiple availability zones.

Having originally started out using AWS, I had assumed that every region has multiple availability zones.

Azure maintains a list of regions with multiple AZs so if you need redundancy, you’re best off picking one of these.

Some services may refuse to deploy entirely (such as “geo-redundant” gateways in us-east as I found out recently)