Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is Fly - a much earlier stage company and them receiving early funding is the genesis of this entire discussion. I point to Cloudflare (what I'm most familiar with). Across their entire stack of compute, storage, db, etc product lines you won't see a hint of region anywhere. It just works, everywhere. Same with Fastly/Oracle (although they like Fly are quite a ways behind Cloudflare). I suspect (hope) that as Fl…
> you won't see a hint of region anywhere. https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/learning/data-location/ Hint Hint description wnam Western North America enam Eastern North America weur Western Europe eeur Eastern Europe apac Asia-Pacific There is no free lunch here. This is always a game of information theory and physics at the end.
The fact remains this is somewhat down in the docs because it is automatic and invisible to the point it works well enough where most developers don't know, don't care, and aren't exposed to it in any meaningful way. Contrast this with AWS where the first thing you are presented with is picking a region where everything lives, while not clearly and explicitly explaining that many things are ultimately dependent on us-east. Cue the shock and confusion when us-east has yet another issue and those in all other regions don't understand how and why they are impacted.
You are correct about the free lunch, information theory, and physics at the end. I don't think a reasonable person can think when you write data to a pop in Tokyo that it could possibly show up in Chicago instantly. That is fundamentally impossible and always will be. I think CF does a pretty good job making it "magic" for most devs and use cases while explaining these fundamental realities and limitations to those who need to know (potentially) for whatever their application is.