I watched the Azure Internals session from Mark Russinovich at Tech Ed 2013. In that session he mentioned in passing that the usefulness of Affinity Groups changed with the networking overhaul in Azure datacenters last year such that an affinity group no longer ties services to a cluster. Instead it now simply associates them with a subregion.

Mark is an Azure god as I think we all know, so I trust implicitly anything he says. But I am wondering if I could have misinterpreted his comment in some way? Could anyone offer any more color to this or offer their own thoughts? is using affinity groups still considered best practice?

I ask because I am considering removing all of our affinity groups. It has annoyed me to no end since the new html Azure Portal that it shows all of our affinity groups created in the old portal as a guid (how helpful right?). The fact that Microsoft has not seen fit to fix this is another indication that affinity groups just are no longer relevant.

Thoughts?

Hi,

Id like to suggest you to read this article (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_azure_technical_support_wats_team/archive/2013/02/09/windows-azure-virtual-machines-common-questions.aspx ), this article was written by Narahari Dogiparthi [MSFT] in 8 Feb 2013. We will let you know if we have further information.

Best Regards

Thank you for the article. However it references the traditional way in which Affinity Groups have worked. That is to group services together closely as far as networking goes. This used to mean within the same cluster in a datacenter. But the talk that Mark gave clearly indicated this had changed, and that affinity groups no longer have this same meaning due to the way networking is now setup within the datacenter. Perhaps this info is just too new and the use of affinity groups is still morphing for this to be common knowledge.

I was really looking for someone very informed, to get another data point on whether what I interpreted from his talk is true or not.

I'm disappointed there is no guidance from Microsoft on this. Affinity groups have been such a core concept from the start in Azure that any change in their value would seem to be very pertinent to document and inform customers.

Note, as of 2015:

"Additionally, we recommend that you dont use affinity groups in general."

 

From <https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/jj156085.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396>