[gregwebs]

There are a lot of cases of low traffic applications that aren’t toys but instead are internal tools- this could be a great option for those.

For higher traffic they are asking you to figure out how to shard your data and it’s compute. That’s really hard to do without hitting edge cases.

[stavros]

Why would you use this for an internal, low-traffic tool over Postgres?

[alright2565]

It's so low traffic that you don't want to pay the minimum $35/mo for a PostgreSQL instance on AWS maybe. Or you're required by policy to have a single-tenant architecture, but a full always-on database server would be overkill.

[fracus]

Could this be used to get a time edge in trading? I'm not an expert, just thinking out loud. I remember hearing about firms laying wire in a certain way because getting a microsecond jump on changing rates could be everything for them.

[crabmusket]

I'm also no expert, but from reading around the subject a little (Flash Boys by Michael Lewis was pretty cool, also Jane Street's podcast has some fantastic information)... no. I doubt you'd be on a public cloud if low-latency trading is what you're doing.

[aldonius]

Aren't the HFT boxes usually stock exchange colocations? Each trader gets a rack (or multiple racks depending on size) in the exchange's datacenter, every rack has the same cable length to the switch, etc.