Interesting side-effect of the enormity of the infrastructure behind a public cloud service.
Some Azure customers may have noticed that for a VM deployed in a US region, when they launch a localized page on a web browser it may redirect them to an international site. The following explains why this may be happening.
Potential Cause
IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the United States, meaning there is no additional IPv4 address space available. This requires Microsoft to use the IPv4 address space available to us globally for the addressing of new services. The result is that we will have to use IPv4 address space assigned to a non-US region to address services which may be in a US region. It is not possible to transfer registration because the IP space is allocated to the registration authorities by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
At times your service may appear to be hosted in a non-US location.
Service and Data are located where deployed
It is important to note that the IP address registration authority does not equate to IP address physical location (i.e., you can have an IP address registered in Brazil but allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia). Thus when you deploy to a U.S. region, your service is still hosted in U.S. and your customer data will remain in the U.S. as detailed in our Trust Center: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/privacy/
We are currently working with a few major IP geo-location database companies to update the location of these IPs which should help alleviate the issues this may be causing.
Source: Microsoft Azure Blog
Given that Microsoft hasn’t really made much progress in moving their cloud to support ipv6, now may be the time.
Microsoft has played a leading role in helping customers to smoothly transition from IPv4 to IPv6 for the past several years. To date, Microsoft has built IPv6 support into many of its products and solutions like Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Microsoft is committed to expanding the worldwide capabilities of the Internet through IPv6 and enabling a variety of valuable and exciting scenarios, including peer-to-peer and mobile applications. The foundational work to enable IPv6 in the Azure environment is well underway. However, we are unable to share a date when IPv6 support will be generally available at this time. For more information on IPv6 technologies and IPv6 support available in the Windows operating system today, see Microsoft’s IPv6 information site which includes business, technical, and developer resources: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/bb530961
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