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I am new to Azure and website deployment, and I am trying to make sure I understand how things work. As far as I understand, once I create a website, a web application is created and begins to run in the cloud before publishing my own site even.

I know that the cloud provides scalability, load-balancing (among multiple datacenters), ease of publishing/testing, etc...things that don't exist in traditional web hosting.

So my question is since my website is in the cloud/Azure now, would my website be replicated globally in MS datacenters? If yes, is it something different from load-balancing? in other words, is the idea behind it is to get my site replicated to provide faster access from all over the world. And if all these are correct, I suppose traditional web hosting doesn't support replication.

Sorry for the simple questions, but I really need to understand, and I would appreciate any details you could provide.

user2477240
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Q: So my question is since my website is in the cloud/Azure now, would my website be replicated globally in MS datacenters?

A: Your website won't be automatically replicated globally to all MS datacenters. Each azure service, whether it is an cloud-service, sql-azure, storage, website or VM is located at a location of your choice. Within a location you can scale some of the services to run in multiple instances. If you spawn a new instance your website gets replicated. But it still runs at the same geo-location.

Q: If yes, is it something different from load-balancing?

A: In Azure you need to distinguish between load-balancing and traffic-management. If you run multiple instances within one location, there is only one external URL to reach it. The load-balancer distributes traffic equally to every running service instance.

The Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic to Windows Azure hosted services. The hosted services can be running in the same data center or in different centers across the world. Traffic Manager works by applying an policy engine to the Domain Name Service (DNS) queries on your domain name(s).

So in general, if you want to spread your application all over the world, you have to do it by yourself.

Create your service on all the location of your choice and use Traffic Manager to connect them.

larrydahooster
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