"There's a minimum of three zones within a single region" YET "Not every region has support for availability zones.". How?

Question

This is very basic / fundamental oriented question.

Fact: "There's a minimum of three zones within a single region" Fact: "Not every region has support for availability zones."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/azure-architecture-fundamentals/regions-availability-zones

How can a region that has no support for availability zones have a minimum of 3 zone? It doesn't make any logical sense so I guess I am misreading here. So can someone clarify exactly what am I missing?

Answer 1

From the official doc:

Azure availability zones are physically separate locations within each Azure region that are tolerant to local failures.

How can a region that has no support for availability zones have a minimum of 3 zone?

Not all regions support availability zone at this moment. You can find a list of regions that support availability zones in here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/availability-zones/az-overview#azure-regions-with-availability-zones

Answer 2

I think you are confusing a region and an availability zone-enabled region. A region can have a single zone. Regions with three or more zones are an availability zone-enabled region.