title: SQL Azure Geo Replication for non-redunancy purposes
body: <p>I'm just doing a little research on how to build a large-scale, globally accessible application on Azure.</p>
  
  <p>There's lots of tech in there already to get your application as close to the consumer as possible.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>CDN Edge Servers for static content shared around the world.</li>
  <li>Cloud Services in different regions, using Traffic Manager to route a domain name to the nearest application host.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The bit I'm a bit confused about is the Database. If you are using SQL Azure, you have to specify a region to place it in. If my SQL Azure instance is in West Europe (Amsterdam), but my customers are in australia, and accessing the application via an instance in Australia (NSW), there's going to be some latency between the application talking to the database.</p>
  
  <p>All the references I've seen about Geo Replication seem to be in the context of a Master-Slave redundancy setup. But I'm wondering is it feasible to have a Master-Master setup where each application instance talks to it's own SQL Azure master instance in the same Geo-Region, and then sql azure would take care of the Bi-Directional replication between them.</p>