A couple of days ago I noticed someone was using the default datacenter region (West US) to deploy resources to instead of their local (West Europe) datacenter. I’ve asked that person for his reason. His response was that he didn’t thought that it made a significant difference….
To demonstrate the differences between the (Azure) datacenter regions I used the Azure Speed Test 2.0 website (link).
As you can clearly see the differences between my local datacenter region (West Europe) and for example Australia, Japan and East Asia. Ofcourse those counties “sound far away” but many people think East US is “nearby” (only the ocean between us)
So keep this in mind the next time you deploy services in Azure (or any other cloud provider!)