AZURE & CLOUD

How to Choose the Azure Region

What you should consider before choosing Azure Region? How Microsoft geographically divide datacentres position to secure high availability and disaster recovery?

Daniel Rusnok
4 min readOct 14, 2020

--

Introduction

Most of the Azure resources demand the region to be specified. I was struggling with this choice and always picked the one nearest to my location. Lately, I found out that the choice should be made more based on the physical location of resource users than the location of me, and I changed it.

After a while, one question still bothers me — Does the choice of region matter more than I think? Then, I started to dig deeper into this topic and boy. It really matters, especially on enterprise application levels.

Azure Regions

Azure regions approximately specified Azure Resource’s physical location. It is not the precise location of the machine your resource is hosted on but it’s more the scope where you expect the majority of requests. So, the first question you should ask yourself is:

Where is most service users?

Some services are not available in every region. You can find out which service is available where at Microsoft webpage. Few of services from Azure portfolio is defined as global. Which means they are highly available in every region. For example, Azure Active Directory.

Source

If you are designing the whole cloud infrastructure, you should check the availability of each service in the region you planned to use. So, the second question you should ask yourself is:

Is each of service you need available in the region you want to use?

Another reason to pick different region can be regulatory and compliance reasons with regards to data residency. Data residency refers to the physical location of information in environments such as the cloud or on-premises servers.

--

--

Daniel Rusnok

Senior Software Developer. Loving to gain & share knowledge. Focused on Microsoft technologies like Azure, .NET Core & C#. Software Architecture enthusiasist.