Azure East US vs East US 2 – What’s the difference?

For several years now, Applied Innovations has assisted companies with Planning, Deploying, Managing and Optimizing their Azure environments.  Customers understand the difference between regions like US East and US Wesd but often ask the question “What’s the deal with Azure East US and East US 2?” So I thought I’d take a moment to go over it.

Geographic Location

Each region in Azure is generally in a different geographic area, for example, Azure East is in Virginia and Azure West is in California.  But what about East 2? Well, it’s in Virginia too! In fact, Microsoft Azure has three regions in Virginia:  East US, East US2, and US Gov Virginia.  So from a geographic perspective, there’s no huge difference.

Cost of Compute in a Region

Another common point of contention for our customers is that each region has different pricing. The same server in one region can be priced differently in another region.  In fact, on azureprice.net you can see this from the graphic there:

So you can see from an Average price perspective, East US 2 is generally superior to East US (by about 10%)

Available Services

The next ‘gotcha’ when it comes to Azure is that not all services roll out at the same time in all of the regions.  For example, take VM Sizes.  G, M and GS series VMs are not available in East US and likewise, Fv2, H, NCv2 are not available in East US2.  Or Storage services is another place with differences. In Azure East US you can’t get StorSimple services and in Azure East US 2 you can’t get Data Lake Stores.  Now Microsoft is frequently rolling out services in new regions all the time. So the best reference is to watch this site: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/regions/services/

Compliance & Data Sovereignty

The last things to consider are Compliance requirements and Data Sovereignty requirements but since we’re talking about two US regions there’s really not a difference here.

One more thing.

One other thing to consider is network latency. Even though geographically the two networks are in the same general area, they are in two different areas and the path data takes from one datacenter to another may be very different. So the network latency between the two regions to your location is a key factor to consider as well. From my office in Boca Raton, the latency to East US 2 is generally 10-20% lower than that to East US.  You can monitor your own latency here: http://www.azurespeed.com/

So there you have it

That’s the differences between Azure East US and East US2.  Should you be asked the question

Question: “What’s the difference between Azure East US and East US 2?“, simply say

Answer: “it’s really going to come down to price with East US 2 having lower prices by about 10%, availability of services in each region and network latency to your location”.

If the question is:

Question: “Which is better, Azure East US or East US 2?” the answer is going to be:

Answer: “Depends on the services you need and the latency requirements but typically East US 2 is less expensive”