Expanding the multicloud advantage: Picking the right Azure regions for AWS developers

This post is part of a series on replicating apps from AWS to Azure. View all posts in this series.

As a software development company, expanding or replicating your Marketplace offer from AWS to Microsoft Azure, one of the most foundational steps is selecting the right Azure region. While AWS and Azure both offer extensive global infrastructure, the architecture, service availability, and underlying design philosophies differ. For software companies aiming to deliver consistent performance, scale globally, and meet operational expectations, understanding how Azure regions work—and how they compare to AWS—is essential.

Choosing the right Azure region is a critical step in successfully replicating your AWS-based app. Understanding how Azure regions differ from AWS—across availability, service coverage, and compliance—can help you make smarter decisions that improve performance, reduce latency, and meet customer expectations. This article will guide you through key regional considerations to help you plan your multicloud expansion with confidence.

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This guide breaks down everything software development companies need to know to make informed region decisions based on your business and operational requirements like availability, reliability, resiliency, performance, security, compliance, and cost.

Key factors for region selection

1. Understanding the Region and Availability Zone Models

Before you map your AWS architecture to Azure, it's important to understand how the two platforms structure their global infrastructure. Both AWS and Azure use regions and Availability Zones (AZs) to deliver high availability and resilience. AWS regions typically include 3–6 AZs—physically separated data centers that support fault-tolerant architectures. Azure also offers multiple AZs in supported regions (usually three or more) and introduces a unique concept: region pairs—predefined, geographically aligned region combinations designed for disaster recovery and sequential update rollout.

While not all Azure regions currently include AZs, Azure’s expansive global footprint—more regions than any other cloud provider—gives software companies exceptional flexibility to deploy close to customers, meet data residency requirements, and scale with confidence.

As you plan your region strategy, it’s also essential to consider Azure's broad geographic coverage. Azure offers an extensive and diverse network of regions, including emerging markets, such as South Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe. This expanded reach can help software companies unlock new opportunities in underserved markets.

• Expanded Market Access: Azure's unique regional presence enables software companies to serve new customer segments and comply with local data regulations.

• Geographic Flexibility: With over 60 regions worldwide, you can design a global presence tailored to your users' needs. Just be sure to check the Azure Products by Region to confirm that your required services are available in each region you’re considering.

2. Availability Zones and high availability

Software companies coming from AWS are accustomed to architecting for resiliency using multi-AZ deployments, which distribute workloads across isolated data centers within a region to avoid a single point of failure. Azure supports a similar model—but with important considerations.

• Check AZ Support: about half of Azure regions support availability zones. You can verify this on Microsoft’s Azure region availability page.

• Region Pairs: If your target region doesn’t support AZs, leverage region pairs to implement cross-region redundancy. Example: If you’re used to deploying across us-west-1 and us-west-2 in AWS for failover, you might consider Azure’s West US and West Central US, which are region pairs designed for this purpose.

3. Service availability by region

Azure continuously expands its global reach, with advanced and preview services becoming available in select regions first-providing early access and ensuring a phased, reliable rollout across location.

• Verify service coverage: Use the Azure Products by Region tool to ensure your required services—like Azure Container Apps, Cosmos DB, or Azure OpenAI—are supported in your target region.

• Verify SKU coverage: When deploying services such as AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), it’s vital to confirm not only the availability of the service in your chosen region but also the support for the specific VM SKU required for the AKS node pool.

When planning your Azure deployment, it’s crucial not only to verify the availability of core services in your chosen region but also to ensure that all required features, SKUs, and dependent services—such as networking, identity, storage, and monitoring—are supported. This comprehensive approach prevents unexpected issues during provisioning and guarantees the full operational functionality of your solution.

4. Disaster recovery and resilience

Azure offers parallel capabilities to cross-region replication available in AWS but implements differently.

• Region Pairs: Azure automatically geo-replicates platform services like Azure Storage and Azure SQL between paired regions.
• Manual Replication: Use Azure Site Recovery for infrastructure-level disaster recovery between any two regions.

Zonal and Regional Redundancy: Zonal and regional redundancy are available to meet your fault tolerance requirements—Zonal redundancy enables automatic failover across zones for services with multi AZ enabled in a single region, protecting against localized datacenter failures while maintaining low-latency access. Regional resiliency provides resiliency against full region outage by replicating services across geographically separate region—ideal for disaster recovery scenarios.

• Multi-AZ failover protects against localized datacenter issues within a region, offering high availability with low latency.
• Multi-region failover safeguards against full region outages by replicating services across geographically separate Azure regions.

5. Network latency and performance optimization

Latency isn't just about user experience—it's also critical for communication between services and data centers. Optimizing network design ensures your applications perform reliably under real-world conditions.

• Virtual Network Peering: Azure's VNet peering (similar to AWS VPC Peering) enables private, low-latency communication between virtual networks, both within a region and across regions, without traffic traversing the public internet.
• Azure ExpressRoute: For scenarios requiring consistent, ultra-low latency between on-premises infrastructure and Azure, ExpressRoute provides a dedicated private connection. This is Azure’s counterpart to AWS Direct Connect.
• Private Endpoint: Allow access to Azure services via Private Link, over a private IP within your VNet—bypassing the public internet. This reduces exposure to internet congestion and can improve network latency, while also enhancing security.
• Content Delivery: To speed up access to static assets and media globally, Azure CDN offers a solution comparable to AWS CloudFront, using distributed edge locations to reduce load times.

For latency testing, use Azure Speed Test or Network Performance Monitor to evaluate performance across Azure regions. This is similar to how AWS professionals might use CloudWatch or the AWS Network Performance Dashboard to test latency and identify the best-performing regions for their user base. Additional tools are available like Network Watcher and Flow Logs.

Latency is critical for real-time applications (e.g., video conferencing, online gaming), financial services and IoT and edge computing solutions. It’s less critical with batch processing, archival and backup storage and internal business applications and admin system.

6. Compliance and data residency

Now let’s talk about compliance—something every software company must consider, even if it’s not their primary driver.

Azure provides robust options for regulated industries:

• Examples of Sovereign Clouds:
• Azure Government: for U.S. federal and state agencies
• Azure China: operated independently by 21Vianet
• Azure Germany: for data residency and sovereignty in the EU
• Azure Australia: supports public sector and regulated industries with regional compliance and data residency
• Compliance Certifications: Azure supports over 100 compliance offerings, including GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP, ISO 27001, and more.

Best Practices:

• Match your AWS GovCloud or other regulated deployment to a comparable Azure region (e.g., Azure Government).
• Confirm that your selected region supports required certifications by referencing Microsoft’s Compliance Documentation.

7. Cost differences by region

Azure pricing varies by region, just like with AWS. Factors include local energy costs, demand, and capacity. Here is a high-level overview of how cost may vary by region Pricing - Bandwidth | Microsoft Azure

• Azure Pricing Calculator: Use it to compare compute, storage, and bandwidth pricing between regions.
• TCO Analysis: A slightly more expensive region may be worth the cost if it offers better performance, compliance, or redundancy options.

8. Planning for future growth

Your choice of region affects more than just your launch—it sets the stage for growth.

• Scalability: Choose regions with broad service availability and sufficient capacity. Azure region capacity isn't infinite—some regions may experience temporary resource constraints for specific VM sizes or services due to high demand. Selecting a region with strong infrastructure investment and consistent capacity growth helps ensure your workloads can scale reliably over time.
• Expansion Strategy: Plan for multi-region deployments as your user base grows.

Example of Mapping AWS Regions to Azure: Common Alignments

Here is the list of comprehensive Azure Regions.

9. Key Resources

1. Azure Regions
2. Azure Products by Region
3. Microsoft Azure Migration Hub | Microsoft Learn
4. Publishing to commercial marketplace documentation
5. Pricing Calculator | Microsoft Azure
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