# Availability zones

An _availability zone_ is an infrastructure within a data center that hosts Yandex Cloud. Yandex Cloud resources are either _zonal_ (linked to an availability zone) or _global_ (not linked to any zone). For instance, [VMs](../../compute/concepts/vm.md) and [disks](../../compute/concepts/disk.md) are zonal resources. Examples of global resources: [cloud networks](../../vpc/concepts/network.md) and [buckets](../../storage/concepts/bucket.md).


Each zone is isolated from hardware and software failures that may occur in other availability zones. By deploying your applications to multiple zones at the same time, you ensure their [fault tolerance](../../architecture/fault-tolerance.md) and significantly reduce the risk of data loss.

The Yandex Cloud platform is hosted in four Yandex data centers. You can host resources in the following availability zones:

* `ru-central1-a`
* `ru-central1-b`
* `ru-central1-d` (recommended for new projects)
* `ru-central1-e`
* `ru-central1-m` (separate [Yandex BareMetal](../../baremetal/index.md) zone)



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When new availability zones appear or existing ones change location, Yandex Cloud notifies all its customers.

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