Regions and Region Pairs

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD2YqdDaO1w&list=PLlVtbbG169nED0_vMEniWBQjSoxTsBYS3&index=7

Azure as a Service is comprised of lots of data centers around the world

Regions

• These data centers are then grouped by particular region (East US, West US, etc)

  • The region is described by a 2ms max envelope roundtrip latency

  • That means all servers in a region sit within a defined geographical area that allows for this max of 2ms latency

• Sovereign Cloud

  • US Government uses their own special cloud along with other governments such as China

• If you have users in the east coast, you might want them to hit East US, but users on the west coast might hit West US

• Sometimes you have to follow a country's laws, which means your data has to be in a specific region

Region Pairs

• Microsoft always considers natural disasters when choosing locations for their data centers

• Region pairs give you resiliency in the event there is some sort of failure or disaster

• Some services like Azure SQL DB allow you to choose how your data is replicated, but other services have defined pairings of regions that you can't change

  • Geo-redundant data will automatically pair to its' pair region

• Pairings for each data center can be found online

• Won't update two regions from the same pairing at the same time

• They help you as the customer as well as Microsoft in the event of an issue