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Comment by layoutIfNeeded | Hacker News Reader

Can you make a geolocation service from static files? 2^32 IP4 addresses with 2 floats per address would take only 34 gigabytes of storage. Put 256 addresses in a given file, and turn the other three octets into folders. E.g. https://example.com/192/168/0.txt would contain the location for addresses 192.168.0.0-192.168.0.255.

Would this be cheaper than running these services?

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You could also generate all those files, put that into a GCS Bucket and put an API Gateway in front.

easier would be and thats just a thought: You could build a go/c++/java app which contains that database pre compressed in some arbitrary better format than just 2 floats, get it down from your original 34gig and just keep it in memory.

Like if you know that 99% of all ips in a certain range are from US, then only store the 1% as a list.

Sure, but my point was that it can be done with zero compute cost. There's nothing cheaper than serving static files from cloud storage.

That is just not true.

GCS for example and its the same with S3, costs space, egress and requests themself.

Data Storage 50 GB Standard Storage * $0.026 per GB $1.30 Network 10 GB egress * $0.12 per GB $1.20 Operations 10,000 Class A operations * $0.05 per 10,000 operations $0.05 Operations 50,000 Class B operations * $0.004 per 10,000 operations $0.02

MaxMind sells their databases as files as well as APIs. GeoLite is free to use but not as accurate as their paid products.

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