Windows Azure Worldwide availability

Question

Hi,

I've been reviewing Windows Azure platform for some time, and can't find answer to one very important question.

If I deploy my application within a cloud, how it will be reached from different places worldwide?

For example if I have a web application with a database and want it to be accessible to users in UK, US, China and etc. Can I be sure that any user in the world will get almost the same request processing time?

I think of it this way. 1. User sends request (navigates in browser to my web site) 2. This request gets in a cloud in a nearest location (closest to user MS Data Center?) 3. It is processed by an instance of my web application (in nearest location, with request to my centralized DB which can be far away but SQL request goes via MS internal network, which I believe should be very fast). 4. Response sent to user.

Please let me know if I'm wrong.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I've got an answer on different forum. The answer is no.

Answer 2

Unless you take steps to run your application in different data centers around the world, it will typically run in a single data center. So if you, for example, run in North Central US (Chicago), then a user in Shanghai, China would connect through the Internet links across the Pacific then hit your servers in Chicago. This is similar to the process for a traditional web server. However, you don't need to maintain the web server, there's astonishingly good fault tolerance, and a blazingly fast connection into the Chicago data center. There is a content delivery network (CDN) in Azure, but currently it's only used for blob storage. So if you are distributing images and videos from Azure, they will end up cached closer to the user, but the Azure CDN doesn't help with the HTML pages from your web roles.

Answer 3

Note: at this time data transfers in and out of Azure in Asia is 3 times the price of Azure elsewhere.

ref: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/