Which option should you choose to spread workloads across data centers in a region?

Choosing to use Availability Zones is a strategic approach for spreading workloads across data centers in a region. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, designed to ensure high availability and reliability for applications. By distributing resources across multiple Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from datacenter failures and improve fault tolerance.

When workloads are deployed across different Availability Zones, they can benefit from reduced latency, better load balancing, and enhanced disaster recovery options. This geographical separation allows for systematic resiliency planning, making it a preferred option for highly available solutions in cloud architectures.

In contrast, while Availability Groups are important for maximizing database availability at the instance level, they do not address the broader data center distribution across regions. Resource Pools are primarily used for managing resources within a single server and do not relate to the geographical distribution of workloads. Virtual Networks serve to isolate and connect cloud resources but do not inherently provide mechanisms to span multiple data centers.

Therefore, by selecting Availability Zones, you are leveraging the architectural and operational advantages Azure provides for workload management, ensuring that your applications remain robust and available under various circumstances.