I’m often asked why Microsoft’s datacentre regions for Azure in Europe are named as they are:
- The Netherlands is “West Europe”
- Ireland is “North Europe”
- (then there’s country-specific regions in UK and Germany too…)
But Ireland and the Netherlands are (sort of) on the same latitude. So how does that work?
MVP Martina Grom explains it like this:
#azure regions in Europe, simply explained: Dublin is more North, so it is Azure North. Amsterdam is …. West, so its is Azure West. :-) pic.twitter.com/YdHMFNDSEz
— Martina Grom (@magrom) December 6, 2016
I suspect the backstory behind the naming is more down to the way that the United Nations divides Europe up for statistical purposes [source: Wikipedia article on Northern Europe]:
On this map, North Europe is the dark blue area (including the UK and Ireland), whilst West Europe is the cyan area from France across to Austria and Germany (including the Benelux countries).
It makes more sense when you see it like this!
Image credit: Kolja21 via Wikipedia (used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence).