Why does Azure Traffic Manager resolve Australia to US Servers?

1
votes

I have a website hosted in Azure, which is globally load balanced across 3 different Azure data centres.

We can see from the following DNS check, that requests coming from the US, resolve to my West-US data centre. In and around Europe go to my European DC. South east asia goes to East Asia fine, but the entire of Australia gets routed to the US.

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/www.whatsonglobal.com

Being an Australian resident, and im sure for our Australian customers this isn't great. Especially since it's currently adding an extra 3 seconds of load time to the homepage.

How do I fix this without having to choose a different load balancer? I like the simplicity of the Azure traffic manager, but only if it's up to scratch.

2
azurednsazure-traffic-manager

2 Answers

1
votes

Patrick, first off, the whatsmydns.net URL shows that the entire of Australia is not going to the US. 2 locations are going to Europe, and 1 location is going to US.

Azure constantly probes the LDNS servers around the world from all datacenters and regularly updates the performance tables in order to route users to the 'closest/fastest' datacenter. The fastest datacenter is usually based on the routing and peering relationships between ISPs, so it may not always be the geographically closest datacenter.

Most likely your users are getting faster performance from the website selected by the WATM endpoint than they would be from any other website, but you can validate this by trying to browse directly to the website URLs. If you find that WATM is not sending users to the fastest datacenter then you can open a support incident to have the Azure team investigate the routing and latency table.

0
votes

Patrick - the behaviour is most likely due to there being no local footprint (yet) for Azure in Australia. There are CDN endpoints located in Australia and that's about it right now.

If you've got a site hosted in Azure then you'll be in Singapore, West US or any of the existing Regions anyway so the latency for users in Australia wouldn't be affected by hitting Traffic Manager in the US.