Designing Solutions for newer Azure Regions

Microsoft Azure keeps growing and new regions are being announced and released one after the other, exceeding 60 at this time!

New regions usually draw customers that are geographically located near them, with decreased latency being the key factor. Apart from new customers, large organizations usually move some of their workloads to the new regions for the same reasons.

When designing a solution that is going to be deployed or extended to a recently released Azure region, you should always make sure that the resources that are part of your solution are available in that particular region.

To make the life of the architects easier, Microsoft has created a webpage that provides service availability information and is available here. This page will not only show you the regions that a  service is available from, but will also allow you to add all the components of your solution and confirm it's availability as a whole.

Let's take for example a solution that comprises of Azure Firewall, Application Gateway, Azure SQL Database and Azure RedHat OpenShift. Entering the services and desired regions will show you their availability, just like below:


As you can see, all the required services are available in the West Europe and France regions and we can deploy to the one we prefer.

There are however many other factors that you should take into account when selecting a region, like other services that may be required in the near feature or already deployed workloads. In any case, you should always act according the cloud adoption strategy of the organisation! 


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