As it was announced at MIX this year, Windows Azure Geo Location enables developers to choose data centers and group applications and storage. Today it went live and can be used, you can specify which geographical region you want your Cloud Service to run.
Why is this important?
- Performance — users want to have more choice on where the data is placed so that they could get it as close to their end users as possible and reduce network latency.
- Legal/regulatory reasons — users have requirements on where they can place their code and data and where they cannot.
- Business continuity/backup — users want locations geographically spread. You can now make copies of your data across locations so in case of a natural disaster destroying one of Microsoft’s’ data-centers, your data would be safe
If you now go to create a new Hosted Service on the Azure Developer Portal, you will be presented with an option to put the service in an Affinity Group and select the region for that Affinity Group. When you go to create another project, be it a Hosted Service or Storage Account, you can choose to put that storage account in an existing Affinity Group, this will geographically co-locate your compute and/or storage projects.
Microsoft has now two geographic locations rather than one. Previously, they had a presence only in north western United States and now they have a presence in the south. Going forward, they plan on expanding their presence to more locations, especially outside the U.S.
Jim Nakashima has some screenshots on his blog.
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