Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

> Caches work great for CSS files, images and javascript - stuff that doesn't chance for each user. It doesn't work as well for the responses to API calls, for which the responses are different for each user, and sometimes, each time

Regarding this, there seems to be some people addressing the issue now (I have fly.io in mind, and maybe Vercel but I believe the latter use lambdas behind the hood so probably less effective).

We built Fly _specifically_ so you can run servers close to your users. We do a lot for you on the network side, too, like terminate TLS in all our regions.

One thing to note, though, is that latencies between cities are surprisingly different than their theoretical max. We have apps on Fly with lots of South American users. It's frequently faster for people in Argentina to connect to Miami than it is to hit Sao Paulo or Santiago. The same goes for Africa.

And the "Asia Pacific" region is a monster. Most points of presence there are _thousands_ of miles away from each other. So we occasionally see people go from Tokyo -> LA instead of Tokyo -> Hong Kong/Singapore.

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-telec...