[antome]

One thing Microsoft has really nailed, is the location diversity of Azure datacenters. They have multiple locations in South Africa and UAE, while also having regions in multiple cities across Australia, Japan and India. If I wanted to launch a worldwide product, why would I want to go with AWS, Google or IBM?

[pdelgallego]

Azure regions/AZs are not equal to AWS regions/AZs thats why a single lightning strike can take down a whole region.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-p...

[arethuza]

Two in the UK as well (UK South and UK West) which is a serious consideration for a lot of organisations.

[ps101]

Genuinely asking as I don't work in that space - what's the advantage of this location diversity?

[me_again]

Many cloud customers have regulatory or business requirements that their data be held within particular regions or national boundaries. It should also help somewhat with latency, though in most cases CDN points of presence will be more critical.

[october_sky]

Except, those regulatory or business requirements also have business continuity and disaster recovery requirements from those same regulators, and Azure's region design is far inferior than alternatives.

[slouch]

Services respond more quickly when the datacenter is closer to the user