[davidkuennen]

Do many companies actually need databases geolocated near users?

I'm working on big and small projects/companies and that has never been any concern of ours.

I always imagined it to be something only the very very big players care about. And as a big player I would usually bet on a big partner like AWS, GCP, Azure. Or am I missing something?

[manigandham]

Almost none.

I've built 3 adtech companies including all the tech and it's one of the few cases where data needs to be spread across global regions for latency and regulations. It's a lot of effort regardless of the underlying provider and not worth it unless you really have the scale and latency requirements.

You can receive an HTTP response from the other side of the planet in less than a second so server-side rendering and sending a single HTML page works just fine. The problem is actually all these client-side SPAs that make a dozen requests and are actually much slower because of it.

[simonw]

Companies start to get a lot more interested in this when their business truly goes global. Users in Australia have money to spend and get pretty poor performance from apps hosted in the USA due to speed of light issues.

I've looked at implementing this in the past and always found it to be SO difficult that the benefit would not be worth the cost.

Fly has changed that equation for me. It has moved this problem from "I'd love to do it if I could but it's just too hard" to "This is a thing I could do with small enough engineering effort that it would be worthwhile".

This is my favourite type of technology: I love things that move something from the "too expensive" to the "now feasible to implement" bucket!

[Humphrey]

Yeah, and I guess all my Australian hosted things are slow for you Americans who have even more money to spend

[jjtheblunt]

> who have even more money to spend

?

I'm guessing it's a joke about the government printing money, and the surrounding fiascos?

[sph]

Web Scale was first a meme, than an ideal everyone pushes towards even when deploying their small scale blog. Who knows what'll happen if suddenly you get a million concurrent users tomorrow? Better scale it geographically and put it behind a CDN today. Look at those generous free tiers.

Like you said, it's mostly snake oil except for very big players.

[pid-1]

I'd say using stuff like Netlify or GH Pages for static sites is worth it even if you have zero traffic. They legit are much easier to use than setting up your own VPS.

[fauigerzigerk]

This isn't quite the same thing as trying to scale like Google though. Low latency is very important for usability regardless of how many users you serve. How easy it is to achieve depends more on the geographical distribution of your users than on their number.

If my app has a handful of users that are split between the US and Europe or Asia, and the app is 90% reads, then the distributed DB approach of fly.io or Cloudflare makes a lot of sense. It also adds considerable complexity though, so it's obviously a tradeoff.

[kitbrennan]

Our business has an API that can be used for displaying dynamic information at point of sale (i.e. dynamic in that it cannot be cached and will need a DB call).

While we encourage our customers to try and use us asynchronously, we have a number of enterprises that don't and therefore demand incredibly fast response times with low latency. They pay us accordingly, so as a result we have geolocated databases (in our case though, we are using AWS Aurora replication).

[kasey_junk]

Have your projects had customers all over the globe and have you measured the user experience for those that are furthest from your database?

If so, locality jumps up to the top of the performance bottlenecks pretty quick and there is no amount of performance optimization you can do to fix it.