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?