Use Azure availability set or deploy to single instances to paired region for HA

Question

Considering that Azure will not roll out an update on paired regions simultaneously during a planned maintenance of virtual machines with single-instance configurations, is it a good strategy to have single instance VMs in two different paired regions (let's say, North Europe & West Europe to cater to Europe customers for a simple workload) to achieve both HA & DR instead of having two VM instances in a availability set in a single region & achieve just HA?

Assuming I'm dealing with a small workload to be used by few users in Europe, is having single instances of sync-ed VMs in a paired region a cost effective & workable approach to implement HA than having two VM instances in a availability set in a single region?

Answer 1

Could work for planned updates, but what happens during critical maintenance or unplanned situations? Also, even tho update roll outs are not started at the same time, your VMs could still have it's updates applied simultaneously as there are no shared "agenda" between data centers.

Said that, to load balance VMs you need then at the same region unless you plan to use traffic manager (round robin/failover) or any other custom solution.

Best scenario would be Traffic Manager on top of two different sites, but at least one of them with two or more VMs in a load-balanced set to avoid unavailability in a case of region/platform outage.