Azure Data Factory: Live in North Europe

We are happy to announce that Azure Data Factory is now live in the North Europe region! You can now go to the Azure portal and create your data factory in North Europe in addition to West US.

As we continue to invest in regional expansion, providing the flexibility and choice needed to create the Data Factory, we wanted to highlight few things:

• Data Factory is neither a data processing nor a storage service. Data Factory is an orchestration, scheduling and monitoring service for data pipelines. It enables you to operationalize pipelines across the globe and across on-premises and cloud environments. Creating Data Factory in the same region as the processing and storage services allows Data Factory to store the metadata (linked services, dataset, pipeline jsons) in the same region as well.
  • Example: Since Data Factory is command and control, you can have the web log files along with the processing services in a data center in East US and Data Factory can orchestrate your workflows from West US.
• Data Factory uses a geo-distributed copy service to do data movement (see table below for list of regions, geographies where ADF copy service is available). This allows Data Factory to do a point to point copy and ensure efficient data movement avoiding cross region hops in most cases. This is very useful in scenarios where Data Factory is created in a different region than the desired data movement.
  • Example: You have the Data Factory in West US and want to move data from Azure Storage in North Europe > Azure SQL in North Europe. In this case, Data Factory will use the copy service in North Europe to do the data movement.

Let us know which Azure regions you’d like to see Azure Data Factory by submitting your suggestions on the Microsoft Azure Data Factory feedback forum.