What is the primary purpose of Azure region pairs?
A.To halve the cost of running in two regions
There's no pairing discount — you pay for resources in each region.
B.To provide built-in disaster recovery geography — paired regions receive platform updates sequentially and support data residency within the same geography
Correct — pairing exists for disaster recovery, sequential updates, and in-geography data residency.
C.To let any VM automatically fail over without configuration
Failover still requires architecting it; pairing doesn't make it automatic.
D.To share a single virtual network between regions
VNets are regional resources — pairing doesn't merge networks.
Why this answer
Each region is paired with another in the same geography (e.g., East US ↔ West US). Pairs get sequential platform updates (one at a time), prioritized recovery in disasters, and data residency within the geography for services that replicate data (e.g., GRS storage).
Correct answer: B · Last reviewed 2026-02-13
Official AWS references
Practice this interactively
Answer without seeing the solution first in the Core Azure Services practice session.
Practice Core Azure Services