> so the cloud-hosted version of New Relic is especially slow because of the added latency of the trans-oceanic network hop.

Curious, does the location of the server introduce the latencies (as you mentioned you are not in US)? I would have assumed the latency because of server location would be very small.

Have you verified that the latency is actually because of the trans-oceanic network hop?

Consider that each connection is a round trip (IE; hundred+ ms latency is multiplied by 3 due to handshakes being 3-stage.).

Consider that every fetch of a resource may itself include another resource (IE; a html page which contains a CSS include).

Now consider that this happens recursively (IE from the above example: a CSS include that itself includes a font or an image).

It's very easy to get 1+s load times with transatlantic latency alone.

thanks for sharing, I never thought this could be an issue

Question: Does this increase in latency make cloud services less interesting for companies which are not in US? What kind of cloud services will be especially affected

Cloud services usually have global availability, you choose where you host.

A lot of people in Europe are using European datacenters.

That is not to say there's no issues: The consoles can be unbearably slow at times. (Google Cloud being probably the worst offender in my experience, despite being a fan otherwise).

Amazon supports consoles in other regions, but if you use `console.aws.amazon.com` then it is us-east; it doesn't automatically change it for you.

Here's the list: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/mgmt-console.h...

Regarding making Cloud less interesting:

Europe basically follows whatever SV is doing, to make a crass comment: an article could be produced from SV saying eating poop would make better engineering and European "tech" companies would assuredly start buying up the sewage systems.

Even when it doesn't make sense; we seem to follow.

After using AWS for more than 10 years in various capacities, I've never seen that the console is available in multiple regions! Sometimes it is dog slow for me when I'm in a various different geographic locations, I hope this newly learned fact will make my experience slightly better in the future, thanks for sharing that!

It does make me wonder though, why not automatically redirect people to the console that is closest to them? They could done anything from Anycast DNS to showing a simple little notification showing people there was an alternative possibly closer to them when logging in, but as far as I know, nothing is done about this.

GP is a little confused. The AWS console always redirects you to the the console hosted in the same region as the resources you're viewing.

But the initial login request to AWS goes via us-east-1 by default.

AWS has more recently published the list of login endpoints to use should us-east-1 be offline.

At least a hundred milliseconds of additional latency is unavoidable across any ocean crossing. It’s just physics.

All US-hosted web services feel slow here. It’s a baseline sluggishness that permeates everything we use that is cloud hosted.

The only exception is services that have local instances or replicas of some sort.

I see, very interesting.

Is this latency deterring enough that you prefer running things in your region and not prefer SaaS product which are generally hosted in US/EU?

Or is this just a discomfort which you deal with?

Personally speaking, yes. I tend to gravitate to locally hosted services. In some cases it can be a night & day difference.