Azure Geolocation and Affinity Groups

10. Mar, 2010 0 Comments

Windows Azure can be deployed in any of six data centers around the world – South Central US, North Central US, West Europe, East Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia. ( Microsoft has pledged to increase the number of gelocated data centers going forward. Developers should consider geolocation for any of the following reasons:

Performance — The closer a data center is located to a user the more responsive an application will be for that user. Developers should also consider the Windows Azure CDN which can serve an apps content from the the closest of 18 geographical ‘edge’ locations.
Legal — Legal requirements vary across the world and often pertain to the location in which the application is located
Business continuity/backup — To minimize the risk of an outage due to severe network outage or natural disaster, applications can be spread out across multiple locations.

Azure Affinity Groups

When you deploy an app on Azure it is best practice to ensure that all the components (storage, SQL Azure databases, Roles etc) are located in the same datacenter, affinity groups are the most efficient way to enforce this. Affinity group is simply a named grouping which is in a single datacenter, your services can be associated with this named grouping and therefore ensure they are located in the same datacenter.

Affinity groups can be created when creating a new Azure service (either a hosted or storage service) . After New Service is clicked and the type of service (hosted or storage) is selected you will be able to associate your deployment with either an existing affinity group or create a new affinity group: