4 ms·

Right now, due to vast CDN footprints, PoPs would be the fastest place to run a "web server": S3+Cloudfront / Lambda at Edge, Cloudflare Workers, StackPath Edge

Right now, due to vast CDN footprints, PoPs would be the fastest place to run a "web server": S3+Cloudfront / Lambda at Edge, Cloudflare Workers, StackPath EdgeEngine etc Soon the fastest place is going to be the 5G Edge with products like vapor.io Kinetic Edge Colo, AWS Wavelength, Google Anthos for Telecommunications already making a push for it. Ex: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telecom-puts-google-cloud-partners-apps-at-the-edge https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telec...

bob1029 6y ago
The edge is getting to be really important for high quality interactions, but there are some caveats. In systems in which there is common shared state between all participants (e.g. Fortnite), you fundamentally must have a form of centralized authority somewhere. In these cases, you do not gain very much by pushing things to the edge if most interactions require taking a round trip through the business state machine. This realization is why I really enjoy the renewed push for server-side hosting technologies. Accept the fundamental physics constraints, bring all the state under 1 roof, and think differently about the footprint of a global-scale application. AWS solved this problem by making their regions more-or-less 100% standalone. The only major thing that really spans all regions is account/session management, but consider that there arent serious UX constraints around a login attempt taking more than 150ms.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > In systems in which there is common shared state between all participants (e.g. Fortnite), you fundamentally must have a form of centralized authority somewhere. I wonder if there's any big online game already which does match making preferring local servers. And I don't mean local as in "people registered in us-east region", but rather "there are 4 people ready to play in Chicago, spawn an instance there and connect them".
  - bob1029 6y ago
    I am almost certain this already a metric used by matchmaking in certain FPS games like Overwatch.
    - vermilingua 6y ago
      Ditto CS:GO, when I was playing with a friend in Sweden (vs Australia), we’d all have to increase our max allowed ping to the server, or the game would never find us a party.
  - sgtnoodle 6y ago
    Rather than matchmaking spatially, I reckon such a system would measure the round trip time between the players and the available server locations. That's something that typically happens manually when folk sort servers by latency. Very similar idea, but you could imagine two players being physically close to each other but electrically far away, due to things like being on different ISPs.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      I was thinking more in terms of dynamic scaling in really close locations - it's cheaper to check RTT to a specific POP rather than keep running full servers everywhere around the world.
- sudhirj 6y ago
  A lot of the tech now, see Cloudflare Durable Objects and DynamoDB Global Tables, allows having many centralised authorities. Eventually one in every major city in the world.
madjam002 6y ago
I wonder when Starlink is out of beta whether they have any plans to have some sort of CDN inside of their satellites. That could result in having some seriously low latency for content on the edge even over a satellite connection.

bob1029 6y ago

The edge is getting to be really important for high quality interactions, but there are some caveats. In systems in which there is common shared state between all participants (e.g. Fortnite), you fundamentally must have a form of centralized authority somewhere. In these cases, you do not gain very much by pushing things to the edge if most interactions require taking a round trip through the business state machine. This realization is why I really enjoy the renewed push for server-side hosting technologies. Accept the fundamental physics constraints, bring all the state under 1 roof, and think differently about the footprint of a global-scale application. AWS solved this problem by making their regions more-or-less 100% standalone. The only major thing that really spans all regions is account/session management, but consider that there arent serious UX constraints around a login attempt taking more than 150ms.

viraptor 6y ago
> In systems in which there is common shared state between all participants (e.g. Fortnite), you fundamentally must have a form of centralized authority somewhere. I wonder if there's any big online game already which does match making preferring local servers. And I don't mean local as in "people registered in us-east region", but rather "there are 4 people ready to play in Chicago, spawn an instance there and connect them".
- bob1029 6y ago
  I am almost certain this already a metric used by matchmaking in certain FPS games like Overwatch.
  - vermilingua 6y ago
    Ditto CS:GO, when I was playing with a friend in Sweden (vs Australia), we’d all have to increase our max allowed ping to the server, or the game would never find us a party.
- sgtnoodle 6y ago
  Rather than matchmaking spatially, I reckon such a system would measure the round trip time between the players and the available server locations. That's something that typically happens manually when folk sort servers by latency. Very similar idea, but you could imagine two players being physically close to each other but electrically far away, due to things like being on different ISPs.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    I was thinking more in terms of dynamic scaling in really close locations - it's cheaper to check RTT to a specific POP rather than keep running full servers everywhere around the world.
sudhirj 6y ago
A lot of the tech now, see Cloudflare Durable Objects and DynamoDB Global Tables, allows having many centralised authorities. Eventually one in every major city in the world.

madjam002 6y ago

I wonder when Starlink is out of beta whether they have any plans to have some sort of CDN inside of their satellites. That could result in having some seriously low latency for content on the edge even over a satellite connection.