Slow communications between Azure regions

Question

So just a quick summary of what we are doing to put everything into context. We have a socket server running as an Azure Cloud Service (worker role) within the South Central US region. All of our other components (Queue, DBs, web app, API etc) are located in East US. The reasons being is sadly due to not being able to modify the static IP address that was created for the South Central US a few years ago. The devices in the field cannot alter their IP as well :/ So we are stuck communicating cross region.

So what Im asking, is there a way to improve latency? Can we "port forward" ? What other options do we have? Im assuming the latency is our biggest enemy here as we pipe data back and forth.

Looking at load balancing at moment - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overview Thoughts?

Answer 1

Load Balancer is a regional service and cannot direct traffic across regions.

There are a couple of options:

1) build your own VM's with a TCP proxy to achieve your scenario. You could use Load Balancer to scale and protect your TCP proxy instance if you want to pursue that path.

2) explore using Application Gateway for this scenario since it is a proxy and can direct to IP address destinations. This is essentially a managed service for option 1, although limited to HTTP & HTTPS.

3) migrate to a DNS approach for locating your service and orchestrating a migration across regions over time.

Either way, traffic would remain on Microsoft's own backbone between regions.

Best regards, Christian