Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Cool news for application performance in Azure!

Co-locate your Azure resources for improved application performance

The performance of your applications is central to the success of your IT organization. Application performance can directly impact your ability to increase customer satisfaction and ultimately grow your business.

Many factors can affect the performance of your applications. One of those is network latency which is impacted, among other things, by the physical distance between the virtual machines deployed.

For example, when you place your Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines in a single Azure region, the physical distance between the virtual machines is reduced. Placing them within a single availability zone is another step you can take to deploy your virtual machines closer to each other. However, as the Azure footprint grows, a single availability zone may span multiple physical data centers resulting in network latency that can impact your overall application performance. If a region does not support availability zones or if your application does not use availability zones, the latency between the application tiers may increase as a result.

Today, we are announcing the preview of proximity placement groups. A new capability that we are making available to achieve co-location of your Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources and low network latency among them.

Azure proximity placement groups represent a new logical grouping capability for your Azure Virtual Machines, which in turn is used as a deployment constraint when selecting where to place your virtual machines. In fact, when you assign your virtual machines to a proximity placement group, the virtual machines are placed in the same data center, resulting in lower and deterministic latency for your applications.

Read more here:

• ANNOUNCEMENT: Introducing proximity placement groups
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-proximity-placement-groups/
• TUTORIAL: Preview: Deploy VMs to proximity placement groups using PowerShell
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/proximity-placement-groups