Will the United Kingdom be getting a region?

Question

I wonder if there are any plans for a UK-based Azure region? The UK must surely be a big enough business and tech power by now to warrant one?

There are only two European choices as of August 2012, and according to Wikipedia they cover the following geographic locations:

West Europe - Amsterdam, Netherlands
North Europe - Dublin, Ireland

Just in case you aren't familiar with European geography, neither of those cities and their countries are actually connected by land mass to the UK mainland. I imagine Microsoft are loosing a lot of potential business due to the complexities of the law around data being held within the UK jurisdiction?

Answer 1

Hi,

I think you can post your idea on this site:

http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting

Or contact our support on:

https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?gprid=14928&st=1&wfxredirect=1&sd=gn

BR,
Arwind

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Answer 2

I imagine Microsoft are loosing a lot of potential business due to the complexities of the law around data being held within the UK jurisdiction?

Hi,

Every country has it's own jurisdiction, that's a global problem, not only in UK, getting one data-center in every country doesn't seem a solution... IMHO

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Answer 3

Just in case you aren't familiar with European geography, neither of those cities and their countries are actually connected by land mass to the UK mainland.

Just in case you aren't familiar with geography in general, but UK isn't a mainland anyhow, and won't be in the foreseeable future, certainly not in the timeframe relevant to Azure.

However and wrt most Azure related questions, UK is member of the EU and as this most legal discussions are within the EU and EEA are bound to EU-wide legislation.

I've seen similar discussion with customers all across the area (and elsewhere on globe) and it turns out there are very few legal restrictions per country level in particular in EU, and most often its rather ignorance of law than real constraint. Else as mentioned by Vitor, you'd need a datacenter for each country or region, doesn't makes the case.

If you have specific needs or an actual case you may also take this directly with your local MSFT account team.

Answer 4

Ouch - I guess I deserve the rude and sarcastic responses. Reading my opening post back I realise it comes across a bit arrogant and colonial.

My humble apologies. I guess the answer is no. I only want it in the UK so that I get the speed benefits :)

Answer 5

Ouch - I guess I deserve the rude and sarcastic responses. Reading my opening post back I realise it comes across a bit arrogant and colonial.

My humble apologies. I guess the answer is no. I only want it in the UK so that I get the speed benefits :)

Hi Joe,

Isn't "Ireland" a good choice for UK in terms of latency? should be...

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Answer 6

Yes, it certainly was a large improvement over my initial setting of "West Europe - Amsterdam, Netherlands" when I switched. That discovery is what spurred me on to ask about the UK. I'm using web sockets, and latency is a key ingredient to the success of my project.

Anyway, thanks for the responses, I do appreciate your comments and advice.

Answer 7

your inital post talks about legal matter, while seems your main concern is performance? ;)

Very interesting that you see a major improvement switching from AMS to DUB! Not sure where in UK you're based but looking on map I'd imagine both datacenters about equally away, or rather close to you, so latency might be more dependend on carrier infrastructure and network routing. Never thought it will be a noticeable difference on such a short distance. But know you may realize how devs in Japan or Australia feel wrt Azure datacenter locations ...