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My guess is the reason heroku hasn't done it yet is because of latency issues between availability zones. Ping times can be 6x between availability zones, vs. within it. http://orensol.com/2009/05/24/network-latency-inside-and-acr...

More and more cloud services are running on AWS deliberately so there is very low latency. I can host a SOLR index on one service, a MongoDB on another service, and still get reasonable performance.

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Yeah, it's expected that you're going to get microsecond pings within the same building and millisecond pings to buildings across the country. I guess I can admit that they may have had their reasons, but they can't be good enough to justify this lapse. If it's as inexpensive to run this setup as the article says, they should be able to afford two completely separate stacks of servers, one in each availability zone. It's not going to be easy to figure out how to sync the data across each one, but the fact remains that you have to exist at n+1 at least if you're going to deliver reliability.

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