Introduction to Microsoft Azure Networks

One of the major facts in our life is networking. In the beginning, human beings used to make networks communicate with each other to fulfill their needs. That's why when the computer revolution took place, networks were a very important piece of the puzzle to let computers communicate with each other.

Through the whole of the IT revolution, networks used to be an indispensable part of every IT environment to have a properly functioning environment. It is no surprise that networking is a vital part of cloud from many aspects, starting from the remote connection to your Azure VMs, to spanning your environment across on-premises and Azure. You will notice that networks are used with almost all Azure services, this includes, but is not limited to Azure VMs, Azure SQL Databases, Azure Web Apps, and so on.

At the time of writing, Microsoft Azure is generally available in 36 regions, with plans announced for six additional regions, as shown in the following table:

Region	Status	Location
East US	Generally available	Virginia
East US 2	Generally available	Virginia
Central US	Generally available	Iowa
North Central US	Generally available	Illinois
South Central US	Generally available	Texas
West Central US	Generally available	West Central US
West US	Generally available	California
West US 2	Generally available	West US 2
US Gov Virginia	Generally available	Virginia
US Gov Iowa	Generally available	Iowa
US DoD East	Generally available	Virginia
US DoD Central	Generally available	Iowa
US Gov Arizona	Generally available	Arizona
US Gov Texas	Generally available	Texas
Canada East	Generally available	Quebec City
Canada Central	Generally available	Toronto
Brazil South	Generally available	Sao Paulo State
North Europe	Generally available	Ireland
West Europe	Generally available	Netherlands
UK West	Generally available	Cardiff
UK South	Generally available	London
Germany Central	Generally available	Frankfurt
Germany Northeast	Generally available	Magdeburg
France Central	Coming soon	Paris
France South	Coming soon	Marseille
Southeast Asia	Generally available	Singapore
East Asia	Generally available	Hong Kong
Australia East	Generally available	New South Wales
Australia Southeast	Generally available	Victoria
China East	Generally available	Shanghai
China North	Generally available	Beijing
Central India	Generally available	Pune
West India	Generally available	Mumbai
South India	Generally available	Chennai
Japan East	Generally available	Tokyo, Saitama
Japan West	Generally available	Osaka
Korea Central	Generally available	Seoul
Korea South	Generally available	Busan
Australia Central 1	Coming soon	Canberra
Australia Central 2	Coming soon	Canberra
South Africa West	Coming soon	Cape Town
South Africa North	Coming soon	Johannesburg

 

This global presence means you can build your networks in the nearest region, and access them from anywhere in the world, considering that Microsoft keeps building new data centers in new regions, so latency between your on-premises environment and Azure is decreased.

You can find out the nearest region to you with the lowest latency via the following website http://www.azurespeed.com/. Azure services are available in 140 countries around the globe and support 17 languages, and 24 currencies.