3 ms·
We're there because it's where we've found reliable enough remote hands and network. And yes, the thread model of "the USA goes off the internet" is bad enough
by brongondwana 3y ago
We're there because it's where we've found reliable enough remote hands and network. And yes, the thread model of "the USA goes off the internet" is bad enough that we figure things are much worse than us being much use at that point.
And regarding the privacy risk, we haven't seen a credible threat that would have our servers accessed directly by US law enforcement that isn't just as credible anywhere else in the world. It hasn't happened, we don't believe it will happen.
So yeah, we disappear in an interesting little thought experiment like this one (despite having Australian-owned IP space, it's advertised and routed into our US locations, so fair enough it's blocked in this case)
I do think the timing is ripe for us to look at having more datacenters around the world again. We have had both Iceland and Amsterdam locations in the past, and neither were reliable enough to put production traffic to, multiple hour network outages and inability to contact support and get them fixed - but maybe the landscape has changed enough that it's viable again now.
- ishanjain28 3y agoI hope fastmail puts some servers in Eastern Europe or South east asia. Fastmail's clients are mostly online only and dont cache much information. It takes ~5-10 seconds to go from clicking on a notification to actually being able to read anything. It's really not a good experience.
- brongondwana 3y agoYeah, that is pretty painful - how does it compare to other sites in the USA? I'd be interested in seeing a traceroute. JMAP is designed to be pretty good in that situation (we're in Australia and ~280ms away from our primary datacenter) with minimal round-trips.
- ishanjain28 3y agoHey, here is traceroute/mtr of a few addresses from India to USA. https://paste.debian.net/plain/1282885 https://paste.debian.net/plain/1282885 (Zoom out a bit to see it properly) I also created a few measurements on RIPE Atlas. Ping from all probes in India to api.fastmail.com: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/55469007/ https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/55469007/ Traceroute from all probes in India to api.fastmail.com: https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/55469042/ https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/55469042/
- brongondwana 3y agoOoh, that's obnoxious, you're being routed the long way around the world because the closest cloudflare entry point is Singapore, by the looks of things. It's not massively worse than what I get from here: 11. 103.168.172.63 0.0% 5 251.0 251.2 250.8 251.9 0.5 We're using cloudflare for DDoS protection and hence our packets all go into their edge where they get scrubbed before being passed to our hosts. They don't inspect the content at all, so they can't terminate early, which means every packet is round tripping that 350ms. BUT - JMAP should still mean it's only a couple of round trips to have a fully loaded mailbox.