Geo Distribution using Traffic Manager CTP

Geo distribution should be a basic property of Windows Azure yet up until today we could deploy our hosted services to a single data center. So where is geo distribution?

The new Traffic Manager CTP changes that.

Now we can deploy our service to a number of data centers but expose a single endpoint to our customers. After all it is only a question of DNS. Traffic Manager knows where are the deployments of our service so it will rout our customer to the best deployment according to the policy we define.

The endpoint we provide to our customers is actually the uri of the Traffic Manager policy we defined. When a local DNS server tries to resolve it the CNAME that will be provided is the real location of our service which was chosen by the Traffic Manager.

Creating a Policy is simple. No code is required. Everything is done in the portal.

For more information I recommend watching this webcast and reading the content here. 

Manu