Azure Regions

Understanding Regions is not as easy as one might initally assume. Understanding regions is crucial for a good cloud design and architecture.

Here is a nice Infrastructure Map. According to the azure global-infrastructure we have geography in which there are regions which is a set of data centers:

• An Azure geography typically contains at least one or more regions, that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries.
• An Azure region has a discrete pricing and service availability and is a set of data centers, deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
• Azure data centers are unique physical buildings located all over the globe that house a group of networked computer servers.

Aside from this there are multiple names for a region and location, logical and physical locations, different interpretations of geography and IP-Ranges are categorized in Service Tags.

Geography and Regions

The following command shows us all available regions:

az account list-locations -o table

We can filter all regions of a given geography e.g. Europe:

az account list-locations --query "[? contains(regionalDisplayName,'(Europe)')]" -o table

To get an overview of all locations we can run the following command:

az account list-locations --query "[?metadata.regionType=='Physical'] .{Geography:metadata.geographyGroup, RegionName:name, PairedRegion:metadata.pairedRegion[0].name, Location:metadata.physicalLocation, lat:metadata.latitude, long:metadata.longitude}" -o table

The list-locations result also has "logical" instead of physical entries which seems to include staging regions and/or location categories.

Running this command we only get logical locations:

az account list-locations --query "[?metadata.regionType=='Logical']" -o table

According to azure global-infrastructure

The command az account list-locations | jq 'map(.metadata.geographyGroup)' | sort | uniq returns the following unique list of geographies:

null shows that not all entries have a geographyGroup defined.

Azure Public IPs

Azure Public IPs where initially categorized by service tag, service and region. The list also includes IPv6 Addresses for some services and regions.

This Documentation shows how to Allowed IP addresses and domain URLs.

Location Names

Aside Azure Public IPs using different terms e.g. Service Tags instead of regions and different microsoft sources listing different geografy sets and associated regions there are various names and short names: