How to know where a Service is Available in Azure

Solution  · 

pexels-photo-269633[1]Azure has a Global Footprint of 40 regions at the time of this writing (mid-September 2017).

Not all services are available in every regions.  Most aren’t in fact.  Only foundational services (e.g. storage) are available everywhere.

In order to know where a service is available, we can look at:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/services/

This is handy when we’re building an architecture or a quote.

What if we want to build some automation around the availability of a service or simply check it via PowerShell because opening a browser is too hard today?

There are really 2 ways to get there.  Either we look at a specific region and query that services are in there or we look at a service and query where it’s available.

Provider Model

Services aren’t “first class citizens” in Azure.  Resource Providers are.

Each resource provider offers a set of resources and operations for working with an Azure service.

Where is my service available?

Let’s start by finding the regions where a given service is available.

The key PowerShell cmdlet is Get-AzureRmResourceProvider.

Let’s start by finding the service we’re interested at.

Get-AzureRmResourceProvider | select ProviderNamespace

This returns the name of all the Azure provider namespaces (around 40 at the time of this writing).

Let’s say we are interested in Microsoft.DataLakeStore.

Get-AzureRmResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.DataLakeStore

This returns the resource providers associated with the given namespace.

We now need to pick the one with the resource types interesting us.  In this case, let’s say, we are interested in Azure Data Lake Store accounts (the core resource for the service).  We can see it’s available in three regions:

ProviderNamespace : Microsoft.DataLakeStore
RegistrationState : Registered
ResourceTypes     : {accounts}
Locations         : {East US 2, North Europe, Central US}

Which services are available in my region?

Now, let’s take the opposite approach.  Let’s start with a region and see what services are available in there.

Here the key cmdlet is Get-AzureRmLocation

Get-AzureRmLocation | select Location

This lists the region we have access to.  A user rarely have access to all region which is why the list you see likely is smaller than 40 items at the time of this writing.

Let’s look at what’s available close to my place, canadaeast.

Get-AzureRmLocation | where {$_.Location -eq "canadaeast"} | select -ExpandProperty Providers

This gives us a quick view of what’s available in a region.

Summary

We saw how to query Azure REST API using PowerShell in order to know where a service is available or what services are available in a region.

This could be especially useful if we want to automate such a check or doing more sophisticated queries, e.g. which region have service X & Y available?

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