Best Azure Data Center to Serve the Western World

Question

What is the best Microsoft Azure data center to use in Western Europe, North America, and Japan?

Stack overflow warns me that my question seems subjective, so let me make it specific. Which data center will have the best average ping time weighted by the population in these areas? The Azure firewall does not seem to miss ping, but I think the HTTP connection time is a decent proxy.

(In the long run, we can host our site in several data centers, but this requires additional hosting costs and additional work, so we do not want to do this yet.)

Answer 1

If you want to service all of them, you will need a data center in all of these places. I would say using these:

• Western Europe: West Europe Place (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• North America: Either US West (California, where Silicon Valley), or US East (Virginia, most Americans live on the east coast).
• Japan: East Asia (Hong Kong)

In Japan, if you host your software on a server in Western Europe (and vice versa), it is simply not possible for your site to be fast.

But if you decide to choose only 1 place, I would say choose West Europe , because the western part of Europe has a population of about 420 million, the eastern part of the USA has a population of about 120 million, and Japan is around (but this is quite far from the eastern processing center data).

You just have to remember that your site / service will be terribly slow for the rest of the world. Therefore, your idea of ​​serving 3 different continents will not work.

Answer 2

I wanted some numbers to add to @Leon Cullen's answer, so I set up a publicly available blob in three Azure data centers and used Nimsoft to monitor this from different places. Numbers are my gross average HTTP connection times obtained from browsing logs.

Western US Data Center

• Western Europe 170-180 m.
• North America <80ms

East US Data Center

• Western Europe 90-110 m.
• North America <80ms

Data Center in Western Europe

• Western Europe <30ms
• North America 100-150

From this I conclude:

• @Leon Cullen's answer is correct.
• Western Europe has fast interconnects.
• The East American Information Center is pretty good at keeping western countries below 100ms.
• Atlantic hop costs about 100 ms. (In contrast to a hop from Australia to the United States, it costs about 200 ms :-(, but we are used to it. All of Asia is about the same.)