Regions

• A geographical area on the planet containing at least one, but potentially multiple datacentres that are in close proximity and networked together with a low-latency network.

• Azure has more regions than any other cloud provider.

• Factors affecting which region you should choose: - Location - To minimize latency. - Services/features - Some are exclusive to only some regions. - Price.

• Some global Azure services that do not require you to select a particular region, such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager, and Azure DNS.

• Special regions: - US DoD Central, US Gov Virginia, US Gov Iowa - For US government agencies and partners. - China East and China North - China has strict compliance and regulatory laws, so it doesn't let let data out of China; Microsoft does not directly maintain the datacentres.