Best Azure data centre for serving the western world

Question

What is the best Microsoft Azure data centre to use for serving Western Europe, North America and Japan?

Stack Overflow is warning me that my question appears to be subjective, so let me make it concrete. Which data centre will have the best average ping time weighted by the population in these areas? It seems that the Azure firewall won't let ping through, but I guess that the HTTP connect time is a decent proxy.

(In the long term we may host our site in multiple data centres, but that requires extra hosting costs and extra work, so for now we don't want that.)

Answer 1

I wanted some hard numbers to add to @Leon Cullen's answer so I set up a publicly-accessible blob in three Azure data centres and used Nimsoft to monitor it from many different locations. The numbers are my rough averages of HTTP connect times, gained by browsing the logs.

Data centre Western US

• Western Europe 170-180ms
• North America <80ms

Data centre Eastern US

• Western Europe 90-110ms
• North America <80ms

Data centre Western Europe

• Western Europe <30ms
• North America 100-150

From this I conclude:

• @Leon Cullen's answer is right.
• Western Europe has fast interconnects.
• The Eastern US data centre is pretty good for keeping western countries below 100ms.
• The atlantic hop costs about 100ms. (By contrast the hop from Australia to the US costs about 200ms :-(, but we're used to that. All of Asia is about the same cost.)

Answer 2

If you want to serve all of them, you'll need a datacenter in all of those locations. I'd say use these:

• Western Europe: West Europe location (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• North America: Either US West (California, where silicons valley is) or US East (Virginia, most of the americans live on the east coast)
• Japan: East Asia (Hong kong)

There's just no way your site is going to be fast in Japan if you place your software on a server in western Europe (and the other way around).

But IF you decide to choose only 1 location I'd say choose West Europe because the western part of Europa has a population of around 420M, the eastern part of the US has a population of roughly 120M and Japan is around the same number (but it's quite far from the east asia datacenter).

You only have to keep in mind that your site/service will be horribly slow to the rest of the world. So your idea of serving 3 different continents is not going to work.