Data Center Location - Azure Portal Update

If you look carefully you probably noticed that the option of creating a data center with the Anywhere option has been removed (Anywhere US, Anywhere Europe, Anywhere Asia).

This option was pretty much redundant and was more targeted for fresh users at azure.

Why redundant ?

Choosing the Anywhere option leave the azure app-fabric the decisions where to install your hosted service based on available data centers in that region.
Behind the scene the chosen data-center location does not register at the RDFE server (router and traffic manager above the fabric controller) configuration as it done when you choose the actual data center location thus causing this information not to be exposed for externals APIs.
If you think about it, should you care where your service is located ?
Yes you do!!!!
The data center location should be as close as possible to the major amount of users geographical location.
You could find yourself dealing with latency problem because of not choosing the right data center.
Moreover if you have a full blown Saas solution that uses on or more of the azure service  (storage, caching, service bus etc..) it highly important to understand what is the physical/geographical impact of each of the azure services Paas Lego parts.

Taking the decision for choosing the data center location can be taken a bit further.
It a good practice to define an affinity groups in your subscription account
(Just as a short reminder affinity group is an alias to a data center location)

Once you define an affinity group you could rest assured that your hosted service data center location is in sync with the rest of the azure services you are using in your application.
So instead of choosing a data center when you create a hosted service or a storage account just choose the affinity group name.

About these ads