Azure zones and regions

Azure cloud is backed up by large data centers interconnected into a single large network. The data centers are grouped together based on their physical proximity to Azure regions. For example, a couple of data centers in Western Europe together are available to Azure users as the West Europe region. Users cannot control which data center that is, the exact data center for their deployment. They can inform Azure about the region and Azure will pick an appropriate data center.

Choosing an appropriate region is an important architectural decision as it affects the following:

• Availability of resources
• Data and privacy compliance
• Performance of applications
• Cost of running applications