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That's not how orbits work.
by rladd 7y ago
That's not how orbits work.
- stcredzero 7y agoThat's not how orbits work. You're not understanding the proposal. The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
- rladd 7y agoSo wait, we're sending entire server states from one satellite to another every few seconds, rather than routing the data to the satellite when needed? Seems like it would be a trade-off that would be worthwhile only for a small number of edge cases where there's a small server size, a fast start-up time, and a huge amount of very local traffic. In which case, put the server on the ground near the traffic? Or alternatively, move just a bit of the data (caches and some processing) around.