What best describes the role of zones in cloud infrastructure?

Zones in cloud infrastructure play a crucial role in ensuring redundancy and isolating failures. This is primarily because zones refer to distinct locations within a cloud provider's data centers that are designed to operate independently from one another. Each zone can consist of multiple data centers, and they facilitate disaster recovery and high availability by ensuring that if one zone experiences a failure—due to power outages, natural disasters, or technical issues—other zones remain unaffected and continue to operate normally. This design not only increases the reliability of cloud services but also allows for seamless switching and failover capabilities, ensuring that applications remain available and data integrity is maintained.

The purpose of zones is not to handle encryption or direct user access, which are typically managed by different security protocols and systems within the cloud infrastructure. Similarly, regulating internet traffic falls under networking services rather than the specific function of zones. Therefore, the function of ensuring redundancy and isolating failures is the primary aspect that accurately describes the role of zones in cloud infrastructure.