about Windows Azure affinity groups (Affinity Groups)

Recently, in communication with some customers and friends, it was found that the concept of Windows Azure Affinity group was seldom understood. My recommendation is to use affinity groups to optimize network access speeds within the same region. If my statement is wrong, you are welcome to correct me.

About the concept of "affinity Group" (from MSDN):

An affinity group is a way to group cloud services to achieve optimal performance by enabling cloud services to approach each other within the Azure datacenter. When you create an affinity group, the affinity group lets Azure know that all the services that belong to your affinity group are physically as close as possible. For example, if you want the service to run your data and code together, specify the same affinity group for those cloud services. These cloud services will then run on hardware that is located very close to the data center. This can reduce latency and improve performance, while also reducing costs. ”

With the official definition, we know that applications like Web application servers and database server classes that use affinity groups will optimize performance.

Steps to create an affinity group:

1. Log in to Windows Azure Management Portal, international or domestic

2. In the "Settings" option, select "Affinity Group"

3. Click "Add" to create a new affinity group, fill in the necessary information, and click "Finish".

4. Using affinity groups

We can select the affinity group when creating a virtual machine

about Windows Azure affinity groups (Affinity Groups)