How can I route azure storage traffic to the closest container geographically?

Question

We are sharing static files with our users that are stored as blobs in Azure Blobs Storage. We have users in the US and in the UK and initially the only storage account was in the US, but our UK users complained that some downloads wouldn't complete.
I set up a new storage account in the UK and blob replication. I have verified that our blobs are on both storage accounts. Both storage accounts use the "Microsoft network routing". I thought this routing would take care of proximity routing automatically, but my tracert tests indicated that this is not the case.

So I tried to configure some explicit routing process. First with Traffic Manager but this doesn't seem to work with Azure Storage.

I then tried to configure Azure Front Door. I have a default route with an origin group with my two origins (blob storages). I didn't see any option to configure the routing preferences (latency, geographic, load, etc).

I then retested with tracert from the US and from the UK to hit the Front Door endpoint and still end up on the US storage server!

If anyone has a suggestion, I would be grateful!

Answer 1

Hi @Raphael
Have you tried by any chance with Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) or by configuring the storage account with read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)?

Reference:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cdn/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-create-a-storage-account-with-cdn
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy#read-access-to-data-in-the-secondary-region

If you plan to test any of these, I'd be glad to hear how it suits your needs or if you discovered any limitations in your specific scenario.