How to choose Azure region

While working with Azure, probably not once, you have faced a dilemma of choosing the right Azure region. Of course, the decision is not always straightforward. There are several factors that may influence your final choice. So, what to consider to choose Azure region? Here I list several aspects that may help you with your decision making process.

Stringent regulations

This is related to regulations that are specific to your business which you need to adhere to. Basically, the geographical dispersion of the public cloud services is great benefit. However, in particular cases, your sensitive data or intellectual property require to reside under special jurisdiction. You should be aware what are the requirements and regulations that you need to follow, and apply it as one of the most important factors in choosing Azure region. Please note that it does not necessarily mean that all your business services must run from one Azure region. It may occur that you need to divide services among different regions to meet the requirements.

Security

Another crucial aspect to consider while choosing Azure region. You need to collect all security requirements for your solutions or products. You should also be aware what restrictions are applicable for your situation. Here I am talking about all necessary configuration to be implemented. Also the list of specific security tools and services that must be not only available, but simultaneously be able to communicate with and within this region.

Costs

Every solution you make requires thinking of the final costs. From business value perspective this is important factor while choosing the most suitable region. You need to be aware, that costs may differ among regions. Surely, it is not the rule applicable to every service. However, majority of services’ prices vary among regions. The unit costs may not be significant, but when you calculate it for the whole environment, it can certainly influence your location decision.

Reliability

While designing the solution, you surely consider the business continuity. You definitely want to pick the reliable location. Therefore it is worth to check history of any disruptions and downtimes occurring in the region of your choice. This aspect is related to costs, as when system is down it is unavailable for its users. By extension, not being able to generate the money. Even though, the cloud datacenters are design to be resilient and robust, still downtimes may occur in one region more often than in other. Not happening often, however, still possible. Therefore, worth to check while choosing the Azure region. Definitely, you cannot assume that if historically nothing happened, this region is surefire. You always need to prepare business continuity and disaster recovery plan.

Availability of services

Something that you are probably familiar with, while working with the cloud. Not every service is available in every Azure region. This can be due to time constraints. There are regions which are more ‘popular’ and new GAs (Generally Available) or previews are introduced there earlier. Some of the solutions like e.g. Availability Zone is not applicable for every region, as it requires proper underlying infrastructure. Some of the regions are not part of Azure Global e.g. China regions. Therefore, you cannot e.g. use VNet peering between China and Azure Global. Additionally in China not all of the services are available or works similarly as in Azure Global. One point to take from this is to always check the list of available services within the Azure region you choose.

Dependencies

I will try to keep this short, and not list all the possibilities. Probably due to the fact, that it may not be possible and the list of dependencies you may encounter in the cloud can be long. One of the dependency example may be multi-cloud model for your environment or solution. In such case, you may have some of the resources in Azure and other part in other CSP (Cloud Service Provider). You need to then evaluate each of aspects like availability of services, costs, reliability of the service for both CSPs. This choice for choosing one region, may be especially important, when solution is latency sensitive. Then it is worth to consider the same region for both CSP, of course if possible.

Latency

Location of service users, customers etc. is crucial aspect if you want to choose Azure region wisely. The delay in response time for users, can be important for delivering the business value. Of course when you target global audience, you may consider more than one region. But still the similar decisions process to choose the most suitable one. You probably will not want to end in deploying services in every available region worldwide, as this will significantly increase your costs.  

Additionally worth to mention dependencies on other solutions, services or clouds. As mentioned in the dependencies section, you may build your environment in interoperability mode. Then, you need to evaluate both CSPs in parallel, and verify which region meets or are the closest to meet your requirements.

Choose Azure Region

Surely, a few of this factors might lead to exclusive decisions. However, you need to ensure which aspect has the highest priority and follow it for your business or product continuity, security and reliability. When you choose Azure region, you can also think about governance of cloud.