Final answer:
The purpose of Availability Zones in Azure is to protect Azure virtual machines from a datacenter failure by physically separating datacenter locations within a region, allowing for high availability and resilience against outages.
Step-by-step explanation:
The purpose of using Availability Zones in Azure is a) To protect Azure virtual machines from a datacenter failure. Availability Zones are designed to provide high availability for services by physically separating datacenter locations within an Azure region. This separation ensures that if one zone is affected by a catastrophe such as a natural disaster or system failure, the other zones can continue to support the loads without disruption, thus preventing service outages for Azure virtual machines and other resources.
By distributing resources across multiple, geographically dispersed Availability Zones, Azure guarantees that workloads and applications remain highly available and protect against datacenter-level failures. This is essential for developing resilient systems and maintaining service continuity for critical applications.