Azure data centers and Regions:
Azure data centers are located
worldwide and a team/division MCIO (Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and Operations)
manages all the data centers and its operations. Microsoft divided all the data
centers into several regions called “Azure Regions” based on geographic
locations. Currently Azure services are available in more than 35 regions
around the world and increasing the count rapidly. But all the azure services
are not available to each data center, so you have to check the availability of
required azure service in the closest region. However there are many parameters
need to be consider like cost, redundancy, and network performance etc. because
each region have different cost, redundancy option and network performance. So if
your requirement is best performance then you can follow below steps before
deploying your service otherwise you can compare each parameter region wise.
1)
Find the closest region:
To decide where you should deploy
your workload, there is a tool Azure speed test that can suggest the suitable
region for your workload.
You should deploy your workload
to the closest data center that has the shorter latency time but that region
should support your workload type. So move to the next step.
2)
Check availability of the service in selected
region.
3)
If required service is not available in the
closest region check for the next closer region.
Affinity Group and Regional Virtual Networks
If you are using old azure portal
(Classical portal), there is concept of affinity group. Affinity groups improved performance of
multi-tiered applications. Resources that are placed in same affinity group
minimize latency between those resources because these resources share same
data center. To understand this rack, you have to aware about datacenter
architecture.
There are multiple racks in each
datacenter. Each rack has 40 to 50 blades and has network switch on top to
connect other racks. 20 racks groups together to make a cluster (also called stamp)
and all hardware in a cluster uses same processor generation. When all
resources are bound to an affinity group, they use same cluster. If you specify
the affinity group and create all dependent services in same affinity group, unnecessary
network latency avoided and performance will be improved.
In new azure portal, Affinity
groups are deprecated and Regional Virtual Networks supported for same feature.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/regional-virtual-networks/
