Which data center is the right one for you if it’s all about latency? How can you test this quickly?

Challenge – What is the best region?

You have a location in your global company and are not sure where you want to connect this location to? The requirements is only “Standard SaaS, PaaS and IaaS”?

Product Finder

If you have requirements, such as special VMWare sizes, e.g. with vGPUs, then check the availability of these in parallel here with the Azure Product Finder.

Go to the website and choose your region.

Download the product list and check if your products are available.

Check Latency

In most cases you will be fine with the available product, but want to check on the expected latency.

For a pure latent test, it is best to go to a server at the location and call up the website https://www.azurespeed.com .

I have selected locations in Europe as examples and run them from the Stuttgart area from my private IP. When testing, make sure that you are in similar statistical areas, so it makes little sense to test China, USA and Europe at the same time, as the scale then becomes very coarse.

Here you can see why many companies opt for West Europe and not for the new zone in Frankfurt. Latency is only slightly better in Frankfurt, but the available functions are significantly limited.

The second is an example of latency to Asia from Stuttgart. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have a server in China to test whether I would want to go to Japan, Korea or Singapore, but this is a common question for organisations to avoide having IT infrastructure in China or use the China Azure options.

Conclusion

When choosing your Region to connect your locations, it is mostly about latency and the 2nd aspect to consider is the available products. Especially when you want to look into Previews, use all the newest products or very resource intensive ones (vGPUs) you might want to consider looking into the primary regions like West Europe and not i.e. the regional German datacenters.

If you want to use your own premise datacenter resources and combine them with newest Cloud technology, take a look at how to learn that by setting up your home lab. There is a German version of this article available here.

Please follow me on LinkedIn, Mastedon for more Microsoft Cloud information, Windows Tools and background around the IT Architect role.