Azure Poland Central launched – but can you use it already?

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I was happy to notice a few days ago that Azure’s “Poland Central” region has landed. At least according to my LinkedIn feed 🙂 It looks like great news. It should enable use of Azure cloud in projects where data residency in Poland is required. And for users in Poland, it can mean reduced latency compared to other European data centers.

But is such a freshly launched region ready to use already? I don’t have any insider news, but I’ll share my experience at least.

The documentation is lagging

Currently, Azure’s documentation on geographies still shows “Poland Central” region with the status “Coming soon”. There is also no info about availability zones setup and available products.

This might not be a big problem, but it can make it harder to evaluate what is available and what isn’t. Even ChatGPT won’t help as it’s always eager to mention that it has a training cutoff date of 2021 😉

The documentation doesn’t say anything about the recent launch yet

Some popular resource types are still missing

I tried to deploy a web application to Poland Central with the following result:

az deployment group create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --template-file appService.jsonCode language: Bash (bash)

The output from the above command was:

{
    "code": "LocationNotAvailableForResourceType",
    "message": "The provided location 'polandcentral' is not available for resource type 'Microsoft.Web/serverFarms'. List of available regions for the resource type is 'southcentralus,msftwestus,msfteastus,msfteastasia,(...),westus3,eastasia,japaneast,jioindiawest'."
}Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

So, apparently App Service is one of the services that are not supported as I write this. Which probably makes you wonder what else is missing (or, if you prefer the glass half-full, what else is available).

What exactly is and isn’t available in Poland Central?

I hoped to make a simple list of what is and isn’t available, but here is another learning for me. As I write this, Azure has 3264 resource providers available!

It’s a bit too much to list them here in a blog post, but if you look for it, here it is on my GitHub. Along with the script that allows to refresh it:

Kindly note that resource providers are identified with their technical names, and not the names we might normally use or see in Azure Portal. So, you’ll find Microsoft.Web/serverFarms, but not App Service Plan.

A screenshot of Visual Studio Code showing the difference between lists of available resource types in two Azure regions.
You can use diff tools to compare resources available in two Azure regions (the files were generated by the script described earlier). Here we can see that KeyVaultis available in both Europe West and Poland Central. But the latter doesn’t yet offer Databricks, Microsoft Synapse or Machine Learning Services.

Summary

Whether the Poland Central region is ready for use, depends on your project’s infrastructure and the services you use. There is not much public information yet about the plans, so I am uncertain whether this region has ambitions to have feature parity with the big old regions, or it will be a bit limited.

I hope you found this short status check useful. If you know more about this new data center and would like to share it, feel welcome! 🙂

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