Design for performance and scalability in Azure
Program Management Course
Optimize network performance
In this unit, we'll talk about the importance of network latency and how to reduce it within your architecture. We'll also discuss how Lamna Healthcare adopted strategies to minimize network latency between their Azure resources as well as between their users and Azure.
The importance of network latency
Latency is a measure of delay. Network latency is the time needed to get from a source to a destination across some network infrastructure. This time period is commonly known as a round-trip delay, or the time taken to get from the source to destination and back again.
Latency between Azure resources
There are a few ways we could reduce the remaining latency:
- Create a read-replica of the database in Australia East. This would allow reads to perform well, but writes would still incur latency. Azure SQL Database geo-replication allows for read-replicas.
- Sync your data between regions with Azure SQL Data Sync.
- Use a globally distributed database such as Azure Cosmos DB. This would allow both reads and writes to occur regardless of location, but may require changes to the way your application stores and references data.
- Use caching technology such as Azure Cache for Redis to minimize high-latency calls to remote databases for frequently accessed data.
The goal here is to minimize the network latency between each layer of the application. How this is solved depends on your application and data architecture, but Azure provides mechanisms to solve this on several services.
Check your knowledge
- Which of the following is the definition of the term network latency?
- Suppose your web application is hosted in East US. Which of the following would be the most cost-effective way to optimize network latency for users around the world?