Microsoft Azure data center locations

As title suggest, we are going to discuss about Microsoft Azure data center locations in this blog. This is more important as given the similar cloud services, we assume that location of data centers and cloud infrastructure is what matters the most. 

 

Microsoft Azure follows the typical pattern of major cloud service providers to classify its data center locations. This pattern includes dividing the locations into geographies, regions and availability zones. But since this is mainly confusing for many, and besides this pattern doesn't truly follow the political geographical boundaries, we will simply list out the countries where we can find its data center. Please note that one country can have Microsoft Azure data centers in more than one cities or locations within that city. 

Country locations of Microsoft Azure data centers

Here is the list of countries that host Azure data centers:

• South Africa
• China
• Singapore
• Australia
• USA
• Brazil
• Canada
• Ireland
• Netherlands
• France
• Germany
• India
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• South Korea
• Mexico
• New Zealand
• Poland
• Qatar
• Spain
• Switzerland
• UAE
• UK

Data centers of Microsoft Azure in few locations are reserved for Federal Government. So, we can see that major cloud providers are highly engaged in providing cloud services to government. In part of government, it is better for them to distribute their storage system in more than one providers to reduce dependency on one and increase the security as well.

What is Microsoft Azure

 Before we speak about Microsoft Azure data centers or their locations, let's know what exactly is Microsoft Azure is. In short, Azure is a cloud platform/services provided by Microsoft to the customers in a way similar to that of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or any other cloud service providers. You can use its services for testing your applications or build those applications on it. Also, you can host these applications on its cloud data centers and access it whenever you want, wherever you are. Just the thing is, you need to have your internet connection.

 

Services of Microsoft Azure

I went to their website to check the services that they provide as Microsoft Azure. I could see 200+ products there. So, its quite exhaustive list to put it all here. So, we will list out only few services and products that has been highlighted there such as:

• Compute
• Containers
• Database
• Developer tools
• AI and machine learning
• Blockchain
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Storage
• Security
• Web hosting
• Virtual Desktop

That's not even 10% of services what Microsoft Azure provides. So, you can understand what many varieties of cloud services they are capable of providing. It's good to know the services. But many a times, locations of the data centers also determine our decision on whether to choose a particular cloud service or not. Given the similar services, location does play the role in deciding our choice of cloud infrastructure provider. Therefore, in our next blog, we will cover the locations of Azure data centers.