I looked at Azure to see how these things work there. Here is my current understanding: blob and table storage in Azure Storage is automatically geo-replicated between regions. If you don't want that you can reduce your storage cost by about 30%. VM disks are stored in Azure blobs, so if a region goes down you should actually be able to create a new VM in a different region and attach the SAME disc you had attached to the VM in the region that went down.

For the SQL datbases they provide a sync service that can replicate your database automatically between different regions (or even a local database).

I have no clue how reliable all of this is, but at least in theory it looks as if it might be quite a bit easier to do full geo replication across different regions on Azure.

Anyone with actual experience?