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I have a webapplication in multiple Regions in the Azure Cloud and i'm using the Traffic Manager in Performance mode zu redirect the user to the closest Region.

What's concerning me is the following: With this site https://www.whatsmydns.net i checked my Webapplication to see, which Datacenter is selected. The funny thing is, that people from California gets redirected to the server in Westeurope but there is a Server in US Central too. So from the site of the traffic manager the ping to the europe server is faster then to US central. But i believe, that the difference between these too can not be high...

Now i have the fear, that it can happen that a user jumps between US Central and Europe all the time because he is in such a zone where the latencies to the available servers are nearly identical. I also store files in a Azure Storage account in each region. If the user now jumps, i would have to transfer these files between the regions all the time...

So i was wondering if there is a possibility to redirect the user by his GEOIp to a specific region than by latency?

One of the benefit of the traffic manager is in my eyes that i can use one domain for all regions... the only solution for my problem i can think of is a own cloudservice which replaces the traffic manager and redirects the user to the different regions by their IP like us-center.DOMAIN.com, we-eu.DOMAIN.com etc...

Are there any other solutions? Thanks for your help!

Br, metabolic

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1 Answers1

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If you believe Traffic Manager is routing queries incorrectly, that should be raised with Azure Support.

Traffic Manager 'Performance' mode routing is based on an internal 'IP address to Azure data center latency map. The source IP of the DNS query (which is typically the IP of your DNS server) is looked up in the map to determine which Azure location will offer the best performance. There is an implicit assumption that the IP address of the DNS server is a good proxy for the location of the end user.

The 'Performance' mode in Azure Traffic Manager is deterministic. Identical queries from the same address will be routed consistently. The only exception is that routing may change during occasional map updates, which affect only a small %age of the IP address space.

A more common cause of routing changes is customers moving from place to place. For example, during travel, or simply by picking up a Wifi network that uses a DNS service in a different location, with a different IP address.

A Geo-IP based routing is not currently supported by Traffic Manager. However, please note that it would work in the same way as the 'performance' routing, just that it would use a different map. Users could still be routed to different locations as a result of map updates or changing DNS servers.

As you describe, if your application requires a strong, un-violable association between a user and a region, one option is re-direct users at the application level (e.g. via HTTP 302).

Jonathan Tuliani - MSFT
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