One of the major facts in our life is networking. In the beginning, human beings used to make networks communicate with each other to fulfill their needs. That's why when the computer revolution took place, networks were a very important piece of the puzzle to let computers communicate with each other.
Through the whole of the IT revolution, networks used to be an indispensable part of every IT environment to have a properly functioning environment. It is no surprise that networking is a vital part of cloud from many aspects, starting from the remote connection to your Azure VMs, to spanning your environment across on-premises and Azure. You will notice that networks are used with almost all Azure services, this includes, but is not limited to Azure VMs, Azure SQL Databases, Azure Web Apps, and so on.
At the time of writing, Microsoft Azure is generally available in 36 regions, with plans announced for six additional regions, as shown in the following table:
Region | Status | Location |
East US | Generally available | Virginia |
East US 2 | Generally available | Virginia |
Central US | Generally available | Iowa |
North Central US | Generally available | Illinois |
South Central US | Generally available | Texas |
West Central US | Generally available | West Central US |
West US | Generally available | California |
West US 2 | Generally available | West US 2 |
US Gov Virginia | Generally available | Virginia |
US Gov Iowa | Generally available | Iowa |
US DoD East | Generally available | Virginia |
US DoD Central | Generally available | Iowa |
US Gov Arizona | Generally available | Arizona |
US Gov Texas | Generally available | Texas |
Canada East | Generally available | Quebec City |
Canada Central | Generally available | Toronto |
Brazil South | Generally available | Sao Paulo State |
North Europe | Generally available | Ireland |
West Europe | Generally available | Netherlands |
UK West | Generally available | Cardiff |
UK South | Generally available | London |
Germany Central | Generally available | Frankfurt |
Germany Northeast | Generally available | Magdeburg |
France Central | Coming soon | Paris |
France South | Coming soon | Marseille |
Southeast Asia | Generally available | Singapore |
East Asia | Generally available | Hong Kong |
Australia East | Generally available | New South Wales |
Australia Southeast | Generally available | Victoria |
China East | Generally available | Shanghai |
China North | Generally available | Beijing |
Central India | Generally available | Pune |
West India | Generally available | Mumbai |
South India | Generally available | Chennai |
Japan East | Generally available | Tokyo, Saitama |
Japan West | Generally available | Osaka |
Korea Central | Generally available | Seoul |
Korea South | Generally available | Busan |
Australia Central 1 | Coming soon | Canberra |
Australia Central 2 | Coming soon | Canberra |
South Africa West | Coming soon | Cape Town |
South Africa North | Coming soon | Johannesburg |
This global presence means you can build your networks in the nearest region, and access them from anywhere in the world, considering that Microsoft keeps building new data centers in new regions, so latency between your on-premises environment and Azure is decreased.
Note
You can find out the nearest region to you with the lowest latency via the following website http://www.azurespeed.com/. Azure services are available in 140 countries around the globe and support 17 languages, and 24 currencies.