Azure Northern Europe is Dublin and Western Europe is Amsterdam.

12 April 2011

Windows Azure has two European datacenters, Northern Europe and Western Europe located in Dublin and Amsterdam respectively.

Unfortunately, this is a cause of much confusion because, judging by Bing Maps, Dublin is much more westerly than Amsterdam and only slightly further north.

It's time to clarify this once and for all.

Wikipedia's definition of Western Europe is as follows:

Microsoft's slide from the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is consistent, other than perhaps suggesting that Amsterdam is somewhere in northern Italy?

Let's try to back this up with a practical proof.

Northern Europe

Deploy AzureRunMe to Northern Europe as northereurope.cloudapp.net.

northerneurope.cloudapp.net resolves to 94.245.105.138.

When I RDP in and bring up a browser, bing.com reports United Kingdom.

That would all seem to be consistent with Dublin.

Western Europe

Deploy AzureRunme to Western Europe as westerneurope.cloudapp.net.

westerneurope.cloudapp.net resolves to 65.52.153.40.

When I RDP in and bring up a browser, bing.com reports Netherlands.

That would seem to be consistent with Amsterdam.

So there you have it, Northern Europe is Dublin and Western Europe is Amsterdam. QED.