QnA Maker Service location restricted to US West

Question

since the structural change of the QnA Maker using Azure Search I recognized the only location to choose for the cognitive service is "US West". The app service and search service belonging to it can still be located anywhere.

Is this working as intended? If so, does the knowledge base of the QnA Maker Service belong to the region of the QnA Maker Service (US West) or does it belong to the region of the App / Search Service (e. g. Western Europe). Where is the data stored and which information reach the service located in "US West"?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Best regards,

Alexander

Nicolas R · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-18T22:00:13.163

5

Officially, QnA Maker product is available in many Azure Regions (see capture below, from official site here)

But as you mentioned, the location of the endpoint for the administration part seems restricted to West US only:

the QnA Maker v4 API console tester is only available in West US: https://westus.dev.cognitive.microsoft.com/docs/services/5a93fcf85b4ccd136866eb37/operations/5ac266295b4ccd1554da75ff
In Azure Portal, when you create a QnA Maker resource, you can only choose West US for the Location field
Unlike LUIS, there is no eu portal (https://eu.luis.ai/)

So all the Knowledge base "administration" is through this region, on Microsoft side.

To reply to the following question:

Where is the data stored and which information reach the service located in "US West"?

You must remember the QnA Maker architecture (since v4) which is the following:

In the end, your data is You can check in the Azure Search resource that is created with your QnA Maker Service. See the capture below from one of my projects, you can browse the indexes and see your documents in the region you want, in your own subscription:

Previously, before the GA, the data was... on Microsoft subscription?

edited Sep 18 '20 at 22:00

answered Feb 08 '19 at 13:29

Nicolas R

13,812
2
28
57

1

Thank you for all the information. The main reason for my question are constant considerations from our customers, like "where is my data going?". In this regard I would like to know, what's the concrete purpose of the cognitive service instance located in the "West US" and what information reach this region. Is there any information on this topic? – Alex Q Feb 11 '19 at 14:15
I totally understand your question, that's why I provided these details about the indexes. Based on that, I guess (but can only guess) that the data is in the end on your subscription side so it's only a question of processing (and billing?) for the West US methods. But yes, your data is going through this endpoint in the beginning because it's those methods that are used to create and manage your knowledge base – Nicolas R Feb 11 '19 at 14:19
Alright, thanks a lot for the explanation. I'll take this into future considerations. – Alex Q Feb 12 '19 at 15:32

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 12 '20 at 09:00

The answer from Nicolas R is correct.

Here is a summary statement which I've confirmed with Microsoft (12th of January 2020):

Only the QnAMaker management service is deployed in West US. This powers the management APIs and the portal. There is no customer data stored in the management service. The data and the runtime are hosted in the region of the user’s choice as per the App service and Azure search deployments.

This statement might come handy dealing with such customer requests. Still, it comes without a guarantee and things might change/improve in the future.

QnA Maker Service location restricted to US West

2 Answers2