MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

Friday I got a nice surprise e-mail from the Azure team - “Action Required : Migrating Applications from the “USA – Northwest” – it continued to let me know that the northwest region will no longer be supported.  It suggested that I delete my project and re-create it using the south west region.  Ideally I would prefer they just handle it, but since Azure is still in CTP mode I will cut them a little slack. 

Looking into this a little more I found some more clear details on the Azure team blog here.  It explains “Due to a change in local tax laws, we’ve decided to migrate Windows Azure applications out of our northwest data center“  

You might notice the blog post is dated August – not sure if I saw that and thought it didn’t apply or never read it.  Either way, from my perspective most the time I don’t care if my data is in the South / North, East, West  - I do tend to care which country it’s in but besides that I just want it to be handled behind the scenes.  There are however good reasons to allow some control over the specific location when the application and / or business needs dictate.  It would be great to see Azure provide some tools to allow you to migrate data as needed between the regions.

As more applications move to have data hosted in the cloud we can only expect more skirmishes to occur with the taxing authorities as they wrestle to figure out a balance between getting their fair share of taxes and pushing businesses away.  This article on the Data Center Knowledge site elaborates a little more on the specifics of the Microsoft problem with Azure here.   I suspect we also haven’t seen the end of location matters for other legal jurisdictions of data as well but that’s a topic for another day.

Part of the appeal of cloud computing is it’s ability to abstract you from some of the low level issues of hosting data and computing power.  Power, cooling, hardware expenses, taxes and more are all of the package that makes this type of arrangement interesting.  It stands to reason that companies like Microsoft will make location decisions to where there is a strategic advantage for a key component of their expenses in providing the service.  In fact,  I think that will be required for any of these companies to be competitive.  I also think that making that as non impactful to the end user is also a core requirement of offering the service as well.