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This month Proximity Placement Groups have been announced as a public preview offer and this post is here to tell you about them.

For a long time, we’ve been using availability sets to bring our applications as close as possible to ensure the lowest latency possible however this scenario couldn’t always be achieved because the cloud is shared with multiple customers and you’re deploying resources in tandem with other people. This means that if you’re looking to run a latency-sensitive application in Azure then Availability Sets or Availability Zones are not always the answer.

Proximity Placement Groups are here to remove that latency obstacle for your deployments. They introduce a new concept of co-location where all your deployments in a PPG will always be constrained to the same datacenter and as close as possible. This was a thing that could be achieved easily with Availability Sets but as Azure grows, data centers grow apart and network latency increases.

Before you start using Proximity Placement Groups, take note that with lower latency, you’re restricting your VM placement and that will cause a lot of deployment issues. You will get more frequent deployment failures because you’re limiting Azure where to deploy your VMs, with lower latency comes less capacity.

Getting started with PPG is not that simple for the GUI folks because Portal support is not added yet and you have to revert to the old arm template ?

Sample ARM Template.

{
"apiVersion": "2018-04-01",
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups",
"name": "[parameters('ppgName')]",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]"
}
{
   "name": "[parameters('virtualMachineName')]",
   "type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",
   "apiVersion": "2018-06-01",
   "location": "[parameters('location')]",
   "dependsOn": [
     "[concat('Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups/', parameters('ppgName'))]"
   ],
   "properties": {
     "proximityPlacementGroup": {
       "id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups',parameters('ppgName'))]"
   }
}

Have a good one!