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I'm in Australia and Reddit/Twitter ground to a standstill - request timeout after request timeout. I presumed it was an outage somewhere but was surprised to learn it was with AWS us-east-1? I would have thought surely that my connection would have referenced a different region based on my location.

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usually, DB servers will live in a small number of locations with good connectivity between clusters and the frontends (which terminate the user's TCP connection) live much closer (likely Sydney). Good design means that there are few roundtrips between the FEs and the backend but they are not unavoidable.

Designing truly resilient and available applications with DB servers that replicate across continents is hard.

Is true master-master replication across continents even possible?

I guess partitioning can help, but then isn't it just turning the DB servers into pizzas of master-slave where the Hawaiian slice is master only in Hawaii, and slave everywhere else?

Yeah, you're gonna hit CAP hard at that distance.

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