Suboptimal Integration Runtime Region Selection in Azure Data Factory

For copy activities, Azure makes a best effort to run in the sink data store's region (or the closest region in the same geography) and falls back to the data factory's own region when the sink region cannot be detected; data flows, Lookup, GetMetadata, and Delete activities, and IRs in a managed virtual network run in the data factory's region. For example, a data factory created in US East that processes data stored in West Europe will run its data flows, and copies to sinks whose region cannot be detected, in US East. This causes unnecessary cross-region data transfer, increasing networking costs and pipeline latency. The inefficiency often goes unnoticed because data transfer costs are billed separately from pipeline compute charges.

ADF billing includes charges for pipeline activity runs, data movement, and Integration Runtime compute. Data transferred between Azure regions incurs additional network egress costs, which can exceed compute costs when workloads are large or frequent.

• Review Integration Runtime configurations and confirm their assigned regions
• Identify data movements that cross Azure region boundaries (e.g., West Europe to US East)
• Correlate pipeline-level data movement costs with Integration Runtime region assignments
• Assess whether "Auto Resolve" settings are active in environments that have regionally constrained data sources

• Explicitly configure Integration Runtimes to run in the same region as the data sources and targets
• Avoid the "Auto Resolve" setting unless cross-region data processing is intentional
• Establish governance to enforce region alignment across ADF environments
• Regularly review Data Factory cost breakdowns to ensure network charges align with expected data movement patterns

• Integration Runtime Overviewlearn.microsoft.com