Let’s have a show of hands: How many have heard about Azure China, aka Mooncake?
Great, thanks. Now how many of you have actually succeeded setting up an account and have deployed resources to Azure China?
Truth is that it is notoriously difficult and complicated to actually get access without being present within China. The reason for this is the chinese legislation, requiring approvals and validated identities for most internet activity.
Close, but what cigar?
Discouraged by the red tape, most end up deploying their workloads to the Azure Hong Kong region in order to reduce latency for asian visitors. While close in distance, the network filtering known as the Great Firewall adds a good deal of seconds to page delivery, often resulting in latencies of 30 seconds or more.
Often this is mitigated by utilizing a CDN with POPs in China, which will reduce some of the latencies, but not actually solve the latency problem getting the actual webpage. This is even more painful when dealing with personalised content such as delivered by Sitecore XP, or a transactional web application.
At the end of the day, the problem is only solved by deploying locally within mainland China
Beyond the wall
We have in Copenhagen Mist been committed to solving this problem, and are delighted to offer access to Azure China for our customers. Here are some of the scenarios we are using it for already:
- Locally deployed VMs for benchmarking page performance within China
- Azure CDN within China. Azure CDN is a great offer as it is priced pr GB sent through it, rather than a exorbitant fixed monthly fee which the CDN industry has gotten us all used to over the years. Unfortunately it is on Azure split into a seperate Chinese CDN with its own POPs and a CDN for the rest of the world. We have designed a topology which merges both for full global content acceleration. Low rates, global coverage, content acceleration at great value.
- Sitecore CD node deployed on Azure PaaS in China as an extension to a Sitecore installation placed either onprem or on Global Azure.
Missing a scenario or interested in more detail? Let us know.