At Microsoft’s cloud event last week, we told you about Microsoft’s plans of making Azure available in 19 new regions. Today, at TechEd Sydney, Microsoft has opened their 18th and 19th regions, New South Wales and Victoria (states in Australia), respectively.
Australia Azure Geo will reduce latency and address data sovereignty considerations through in-country data backup. Microsoft has already begun working with customers in a private preview, including: Centium Software, who is using Azure’s hyper-scale capabilities to manage some of the ‘world’s largest events.’ Further, “Almost 70 per cent of our partners are small businesses themselves, perfectly positioned to help our customers move to the cloud on their own terms.”
Microsoft also expanded its ExpressRoute offerings in Australia to give Australian customers and partners the ability to create private (not over the public Internet) connections from the Australia Azure Regions to on premise environments. This was possible through existing partnership with Equinix, and a new partnership with Telstra which enables a more reliable and faster connection with lower latency. One of the strengths Microsoft like to point out is their unique offerings, which enable hybrid cloud environments (a mixture of on premise and the public cloud), and the partnership with Equinix is a huge factor in this.
Another way of seeing the importance of a worldwide cloud infrastructure is gaming. Let’s say you are an indie developer and have a simple online game. You buy server space in the United States, but welcome players from all over the world. Well, players from Australia, could at the very best, expect a ping of approximately 125mms. This only takes factor minimal latency from the infrastructure and the speed of light in the fiber optics cables. In actual practices, Australian players would experience a ping of various multiples of that, and hence, cloud services limited to the United States would be pretty useless to you (if you’ve played with 200+ ping, you know the pain). Now, just imagine this for businesses of varying sizes and uses.
You can read the full details on Azure Australia Geo here.
