Azure for Students — Cosmos DB region selection does not show South Africa North

Create the account in a region that appears in both the student subscription’s Allowed resource deployment regions policy and the Microsoft.DocumentDB/databaseAccounts provider-location list; if that intersection is empty or South Africa North is omitted for this subscription, Microsoft Support must adjust the subscription’s regional availability.

1. Get the Cosmos DB region list for this subscription

Since you already verified that the policy permits southafricanorth, query the Cosmos DB resource provider rather than relying on az account list-locations, which is not specific to Cosmos DB:

az account set --subscription "<subscription-name-or-id>"

az provider show \
  --namespace Microsoft.DocumentDB \
  --query "resourceTypes[?resourceType=='databaseAccounts'].locations | [0]" \
  --output table

az provider show is the supported way to retrieve locations for a particular resource type.^1^

Compare that output with your policy’s allowed locations:

• If it contains South Africa North, try the CLI deployment below.
• Otherwise, choose another location appearing in both lists.
• Do not select eastus2euap merely because the portal displays it. Your LocationNotAvailableForResourceType result establishes that it is not currently deployable for this resource type and subscription.

Azure for Students subscriptions have subscription-specific allowed-region sets, and the relevant list is the Allowed resource deployment regions assignment’s parameter value.^2^

2. Create the account through Azure CLI

If the provider output includes South Africa North, bypass the portal dropdown:

location="southafricanorth"
resourceGroupName="<existing-resource-group>"
accountName="<globally-unique-lowercase-name>"

az cosmosdb create \
  --resource-group "$resourceGroupName" \
  --name "$accountName" \
  --locations regionName="$location"

This is the documented CLI pattern for creating an Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL account with an explicit location.^3^

If it succeeds, the output should contain the new account and a write location of South Africa North.

3. If South Africa North still fails

Capture the complete deployment error:

az cosmosdb create \
  --resource-group "<resource-group>" \
  --name "<unique-account-name>" \
  --locations regionName=southafricanorth \
  --debug

Then open Azure portal → Help + support → Create a support request and include:

• Subscription offer: Azure for Students
• Resource type: Microsoft.DocumentDB/databaseAccounts
• Requested region: southafricanorth
• The policy assignment showing that region as allowed
• The provider-location command output
• The full error code, message, timestamp, and correlation/request ID
• The fact that the portal offers only unusable EUAP locations

South Africa North is a standard Azure region with programmatic name southafricanorth; the restricted region in its pair is South Africa West, not South Africa North.^4^ Consequently, request investigation of the student-subscription/Cosmos DB region entitlement or policy mismatch, rather than filing a reserved-region request for South Africa North.

If the policy list and provider list have no common region, there is no client-side CLI or portal workaround. Request that Support add a Cosmos DB-capable region to the student subscription’s allowed set or enable an already allowed region. Access or availability issues requiring another region are handled through an Azure support ticket.^5^

References

1. Resolve errors for resource provider registration
2. Azure for Students - Cosmos DB region restriction, only US regions available in portal - Microsoft Q&A
3. Create an Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL account
4. Azure regions list
5. How to enable Stream Analytics Job in EAST US 2 EUAP and CENTRAL US EUAP canary regions? - Microsoft Q&A