Introduction to the Region Selection Toolkit

Selecting the right Azure region for a workload is a critical decision in any cloud deployment. Azure offers dozens of regions worldwide (each with unique capabilities and constraints), and region choice directly affects compliance, performance, resiliency, and cost. A poor region choice can lead to issues like legal/regulatory problems, higher latency or poor user experience, and unnecessary expenses. The Region Selection Toolkit is designed to simplify this complex decision. It helps identifying the optimal Azure region for their workloads by automating a multi-factor analysis that would be tedious and error-prone to do manually. By considering technical, business, and even environmental factors, the toolkit provides data-driven recommendations for and helps you confidently plan scenarios such as moving to a new region, expanding an application into additional regions, or choosing a region for a new deployment.

What the Toolkit Does

The Region Selection Toolkit evaluates multiple key factors to recommend the best region(s) for a given set of Azure resources. Its holistic approach ensures you don’t overlook important criteria when comparing cloud regions. In particular, the toolkit performs:

• Inventory Collection: It can automatically gather an inventory of your existing Azure resources (for example, via Azure Resource Graph) or accept input from an Azure Migrate assessment. This inventory of services and components is the foundation for region analysis.

• Multi-Factor Region Analysis: For each candidate region, the toolkit analyzes a wide range of criteria that are crucial for decision-making:

  • Service Availability & Roadmap: Verifies that all Azure services used by your workload are available (or planned) in the target region. It cross-references your workload’s resource types against Azure’s products-by-region lists to avoid deploying into a region where required services are not supported. This factor helps prevent incompatibility or missing service issues.

  • Cost Differences: Compares estimated costs of running the workload in different regions. Azure service pricing can vary by region, so the toolkit pulls pricing for your resource inventory in each region, enabling side-by-side cost comparisons. This helps you weigh budget impacts and identify cost-effective regions without manual price research.

  • [In progress] Compliance and Geopolitical Factors: Accounts for data residency and regulatory requirements tied to geographic location. The toolkit flags if a region belongs to a special sovereignty (e.g. EU, US Gov, China) or has specific compliance certifications. This ensures your choice aligns with laws and policies (for example, GDPR in Europe or other regional regulations). In short, it helps you choose a region that meets your organization’s compliance mandates and avoids legal risk.

  • [In progress] Performance and Resiliency: Provides insight into performance-related considerations like network latency and infrastructure resiliency for each region. For example, it notes whether a region supports Availability Zones and identifies its paired region for disaster recovery purposes. These details help evaluate reliability (high availability and DR options) and potential latency impacts on end-users when choosing or moving to that region. (Future versions may integrate more detailed latency testing and capacity data.)

  • [In progress] Sustainability Metrics: Highlights the sustainability considerations of each region, such as regional carbon intensity or the availability of renewable energy. While this data may not always be available for every location, the toolkit surfaces whatever sustainability metrics it can (e.g. relative carbon footprint of running in Region A vs Region B). This helps organizations factor in environmental impact when selecting an Azure region, supporting corporate sustainability goals.

• Recommendation Report: After analyzing the above factors, the toolkit generates a clear Recommendation Report. This report lists region choices for your workload and provides the reasoning behind each recommendation. Each recommendation is backed by data, allowing you to confidently present options to stakeholders or use the report as a blueprint for the actual deployment/migration.

The toolkit is regularly updated to reflect new Azure regions and services, helping teams make informed, balanced decisions on region selection with speed and confidence.

[!NOTE] The Region Selection Toolkit is modular and extensible. Not all features are fully implemented yet, like Compliance and Geopolitical Factors, Performance and Resiliency, Sustainability Metrics and Capacity planning are in progress.