Azure regions are the fundamental component of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, which allows the platform to distribute its enormous amount of services globally. Each region represents a set of interconnected data centers, designed to ensure availability, resilience and regulatory compliance, and the presence of multiple regions has allowed organizations to distribute their applications and data in a strategic way, optimizing the efficiency of their digital infrastructures. In this article, we'll take a deeper look at what Azure regions are and how they work, and we'll provide a list of the main active regions.
Your company may have reached a point where it's finally ready to explore cloud options more deeply. However, instead of thinking about the prices or the name of the companies that offer these services, you may have more pressing concerns about issues such as availability, fault tolerance and disaster recovery.
After all, in the event of a problem, your data is at risk and losing it could represent a disaster, as well as a big financial loss.
It is therefore necessary to make the right choice about where to place your data “in the clouds” and Microsoft Azure may have the ideal solution to your problems, with its huge data centers located in more than 60 regions (more than any other cloud provider to date).
But what is an Azure region? It is nothing more than a geographical area where one or more physical data centers of the Microsoft cloud platform reside. These data centers exist as part of a perimeter defined by latency to provide the best possible performance and security for users.
How do they work? What are they for? And how do they guarantee the security and immediate availability of their data? Let's find out in the next sections.
For those who are a little behind with the theory, let's start by explaining a bit about how a cloud platform works.
Large providers such as Microsoft make it possible to use computing power, storage space or software on their data centers (large data processing centers active 24 hours a day, seven days a week) without the user having to physically have a powerful digital infrastructure, whose cost and maintenance on-premise could be prohibitive. Everything is managed by the provider and users can access what they need via the Internet.
Azure consists of data centers located around the world, and when we use an Azure service or create a resource such as an SQL database or virtual machine (VM), we are using physical equipment that is located in one or more of these locations. These specific data centers are not directly accessible by users, and Azure organizes them into entities called 'regions'.
A region is a geographical area of the planet that contains at least one datacenter, but potentially several datacenters close together and connected through a low-latency network. The platform intelligently allocates and controls resources within each region to ensure that workloads are appropriately balanced.
Regions are what we use to identify the location of our resources, and when we deploy a resource to Azure, we'll often have to choose the region where we want our resource to be deployed.
Microsoft Azure currently has more than 60 operating regions and another 19 are under development, which means that the company will have a total of 78 regions available in the short term: more global regions than any other cloud provider and these offer the flexibility to bring applications closer to their users, regardless of where they are, as well as better scalability and redundancy for their services and data.
Regions are grouped into macro-groups called “Geography”, geographical subdivisions that represent a region or group of regions within a specific area of the world (generally at the continental level), designed to respond to data residency, sovereignty and compliance requirements at the regional level, but not only. Geographies can in fact be used to distribute workloads in order to ensure business continuity even in the event of data center failures.
Examples of Geography can be:
When your information is kept, you want to ensure that services and data are redundant to protect your digital assets in the event of a failure. When using on-premise infrastructures, setting up redundancy requires the creation of duplicate hardware environments (which have a general tendency to also double costs).
With Azure, we no longer have to worry about developing and maintaining expensive and complex redundancy solutions, and Microsoft's cloud platform can help us to make our applications always available through Availability Zones.
Availability zones are physically separate data centers within an Azure region. Each availability zone consists of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and network. An availability zone is configured to be an isolation boundary. If one zone is interrupted, the other one continues to work. Availability zones are connected through private high-speed fiber optic networks.
Currently, Microsoft Azure has 113 operational availability zones and another 51 are under development, meaning that the company will have a total of 164 availability zones in the short term.
By placing compute, storage, network, and data resources within a zone and replicating them to other zones, you can use availability zones to run mission-critical applications and incorporate high availability into your application architecture.
Availability zones are primarily intended for virtual machines (VMs), managed disks, load balancers, and SQL databases. The following categories of Azure services support availability zones:
Not all regions support availability zones. For an updated list, you can consult the Azure official page.
Availability Sets are a feature designed to ensure the high availability and resilience of virtual machines (VMs) hosted on the platform and allow VMs to be distributed among different physical resources, minimizing the impact of hardware failures or planned maintenance.
The VMs in an Availability Set are distributed across different Fault Domains (a group of physical resources that share a single point of failure, such as the power supply or network switch), so that a hardware failure does not compromise all the VMs.
To distribute the VMs to reduce the impact of planned maintenance operations, Update Domains are used instead and when Azure needs to perform system updates it does so sequentially on each Update Domain, ensuring that not all VMs are restarted at the same time.
Availability Sets often work in combination with Azure Load Balancers, which distribute traffic between VMs so that, if a VM in a failed domain breaks down, the traffic is automatically redirected to another available VM.
Availability zones are created using one or more data centers, and there is a minimum of three zones within a single region. However, it is possible that a disaster could cause an interruption serious enough to affect even two data centers, but Azure has a solution for this too: Paired Regions.
Le Paired regions These are two geographic regions that Microsoft has designated to work together to improve the resilience and availability of services. Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geographic area (such as the United States, Europe, or Asia) at a distance of at least 300 miles.
This approach allows for the replication of resources (such as virtual machine storage) across the geographic area to reduce the likelihood of interruptions due to catastrophic events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network interruptions affecting multiple areas at the same time. If a region in a couple were in any way affected by one of these disastrous events, the services would be automatically transferred to the other region of the couple.
Because the pair of regions is directly connected and sufficiently distant to be isolated from regional disasters, it can be used to provide reliable services and ensure data redundancy. Some services also offer automatic geo-redundant storage using region pairs, such as Azure Storage services.
The coupling of regions therefore has a whole series of significant advantages. Let's see others in the list below:
In the context of computer science, latency is the time (measured in milliseconds) it takes for a packet of data to travel from one device to another, such as from your computer to a web server and back.
Low latency is crucial for business-related activities such as data transfers, where a delay can negatively affect not only the user experience but also the human and economic resources of your organization.
High latency can be caused by various factors, such as the physical distance between devices, data processing speed, network congestion, or the characteristics of the hardware and software used.
Azure continuously monitors the response speed of key areas of its network using internal monitoring tools and measurements. Latency measurements are collected from Azure cloud regions around the world and continuously monitored at 1-minute intervals using network probes. The monthly latency statistics are derived from the average of the samples collected during the month.
Azure also provides tools such as Azure Network Watcher and Azure Monitor that can be used to measure latency between regions and help administrators optimize applications and choose regions that offer the best performance.
When using a cloud service like Azure, it's important to choose the correct region to avoid running into latency issues that could compromise our operations. The closer a region is to your location, the lower the latency.
To give an example, if the majority of its users are in Belgium, the region of the European Union (North Europe) will have the lowest latency and, as a result, will offer the best and fastest user experience.
To check which region is most suitable for your organization in terms of reduced latency, just follow these steps:
We have created the Infrastructure & Security team, focused on the Azure cloud, to better respond to the needs of our customers who involve us in technical and strategic decisions. In addition to configuring and managing the tenant, we also take care of:
With Dev4Side, you have a reliable partner that supports you across the entire Microsoft application ecosystem.
As we have already said, Microsoft Azure has more than 60 active regions around the world that cover more than 150 countries, each with at least three Availability Zones to ensure high availability and redundancy.
The complete list of active regions would be too long to include in a simple article, so we will limit ourselves here to a list of the main regions made available to the service (divided by Geography), whose significant number is already sufficient to understand the impressive expansion of Azure data centers around the globe.
And if you think that there are already many, the house in Redmond may not agree with you. In fact, Microsoft has recently been aggressively expanding its offer, aiming to meet the growing demand for cloud computing services globally.
Recent reports suggest that it is even doubling its capacity in new data centers, securing significant additional server space around the world.
For example, an investment of billions of dollars has been announced for a new data center campus in the United Kingdom focused on AI and a new data center in France for more than 4 billion dollars, demonstrating Microsoft's commitment to regional expansion also through data centers located in a more widespread way and also oriented to use by national companies.
This strategy provides Azure users with benefits such as lower latency (faster data transfer) and greater availability of services around the world.
In the digital age, the evolution of cloud computing has represented a crucial turning point for businesses, radically changing the way in which data, applications and IT infrastructures are managed.
Microsoft Azure was (and continues to be) one of the central protagonists of this technological revolution, with its robust global infrastructure that now allows an impressive number of countries to finally be able to exploit the potential offered by the Redmond company's cloud platform.
The constant work of expanding and consolidating the data center base operated by Microsoft in recent times is a clear sign of the software house's desire to continue expanding the reach and quality of its cloud computing offer. For anyone who wants to radically transform their digital infrastructure and project their organization towards a future “in the clouds”, there is no better time than now.
An Azure region is a geographic area that hosts one or more physical Microsoft cloud platform data centers. These regions allow you to distribute services and applications globally, ensuring availability, resilience, and regulatory compliance.
A region is a geographic area that contains multiple data centers. An availability zone, on the other hand, is a physical location within a region with independent power, cooling, and network infrastructures, designed to provide high availability and fault tolerance.
Paired regions are pairs of regions within the same geography, designed to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery. In the event of an interruption in a region, services may be transferred to the associated region to maintain operation.
Latency represents the time needed to transfer data between the user and the data center. Choosing an Azure region close to end users reduces latency, improving application performance and user experience.
Microsoft Azure currently has more than 60 regions operating around the world, with an additional 19 under development, for an expected total of 78 regions available in the near future.
The choice of the Azure region depends on several factors, including proximity to end users to reduce latency, regulatory compliance requirements, and the availability of the specific services needed for your application.
The Infra & Security team focuses on the management and evolution of our customers' Microsoft Azure tenants. Besides configuring and managing these tenants, the team is responsible for creating application deployments through DevOps pipelines. It also monitors and manages all security aspects of the tenants and supports Security Operations Centers (SOC).
