Windows Azure - Adding Affinity Groups in Azure Portal

Introduction:

In this article we are going to see what Affinity Group is and how to make use of it for better performance and adding a new Affinity Group in Azure Management Portal.

Overview:

Affinity Groups are nothing but to group some of the dependent Windows Azure Services and deploy them in one single place (Data Center). They have certain benefits such as improving the performance of the application with the services since all the dependent services are available in a single location. Secondly for billing purposes we will have significantly reduced charges since we already know that bandwidth with in the data centers will be free of cost.
We take advantage of using Affinity Groups by selecting the hosted service and the storage account to the same group which provides a central data center for both the services and interaction between the services will be much more optimized and we will have better results which is something like selecting the same regions for both the services. In this sample we will see how to add an Affinity Group and use it across the services. Let us jump start to see the step by step process on how to add the Affinity Group.

Steps:

Login to the Windows Azure portal using the following link and we will see the screen as shown below:

www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

Provide your login credentials by clicking on the sign in to Management Portal as highlighted in the above screen, after succesful login we will be redirected to a nice interface as shown in the screen below:

Click in the Hosted Services, Storage Account and CDN option of the left menu as shown in the screen below:

Now we can see a list menu at the left side with different services. Select Affinity Groups from that menu and we can see the subscription details as shown in the screen below. To add a new Affinity Group we have a button (New Affinity Group) on the top left corner as highlighted below.

Once we click on the New Affinity Group button we will get a pop up as shown in the screen below:

We can specify a user-friendly name for the Affinity Group and select a location which acts as a base location for the Affinity Group as shown in the screen below:

Once we selected the Affinity Group location, now click on OK button to proceed further and we can see the progress as shown in the screen below:

Once the process get completed we can see the new Affinity Group created and listed as shown below.

We can use this Affinity Group in all the places where ever we are requested to select the region to group the services and make it handy.

Conclusion:

So in this article we have seen what exactly an Affinity Group is and what are the benefits and how to add an Affinity Group using the Azure Management Portal.