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Microsoft has moved Azure proximity placement groups out of preview and into general availability for nearly all Azure public cloud regions.
Through the groups, users are able to achieve co-location of Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) resources with low network latency according to a blog post by Ziv Rafalovich, principal program manager at Azure Compute.
“Today’s general availability of proximity placement groups continues to be particularly useful for workloads that require low latency,” Rafalovich said.
“In fact, this logical grouping construct ensures that your IaaS resources (virtual machines, or VMs) are physically located close to each other and adds new features and best practices for success.”
A number of features have been added to Azure proximity placement groups since their preview, based on user feedback.
The first of these features is support for the Azure portal, where users can create a proximity placement group to be used when creating IaaS resources.
The Azure portal can also move existing resources in and out of a proximity placement group. However, this requires the user to de-allocate all VMs in the scale or availability set before they’re assigned to a proximity placement group.
Following its preview period, SAP application support was also added proximity placement groups, as Rafalovich claimed that one of the common use cases for proximity placement groups is with multi-tiered applications like SAP.
As such, support for SAP on Azure VMs and SAP HANA Large instances were announced back in October.
Latency measurement between components in services like application and database is also possible in general availability. Proximity placement groups are available in all Azure public cloud regions, with the exception of India central.
