Data Center (CDN) Locations

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Ian Wilson

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Aug 2, 2011, 6:19:33 AM8/2/11
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I have been searching around but have not seen information on where App Engine data centers are located and how loads are spread?
So I have two questions:

- Where are the App Engine data centers? (i.e. West Coast, East Coast, Europe...)
- What criteria are used to serve an app from one data center over another?

We have an application we are building for a customer in Japan and would like to know if there is an App Engine data center in Asia so we will have lower latency.

Thanks.

Ian



Simon Knott

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Aug 2, 2011, 6:30:00 AM8/2/11
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Hi,

As far as I'm aware, the most accurate information the Google staff have divulged is that all data centres are located in North America somewhere.

Cheers,
Simon

Ikai Lan (Google)

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Aug 2, 2011, 2:54:21 PM8/2/11
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The primary data centers serving App Engine are in North America, however, assets and items that are edge cached are served from Google edge caches which are located wherever there are Google data centers. 

When evaluating page speed, it's typically assets that cause page speeds to appear slow:

http://stevesouders.com/hpws/rules.php

Only dynamic calls to your application logic would be routed to North America. If you follow these rules, websites should still load quickly - there is a fairly large App Engine community in Japan.

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Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine




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Brandon Wirtz

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Aug 2, 2011, 3:11:47 PM8/2/11
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After doing some research it turns out that the reason GAE is so fast is that it is really a bot net running on every machine with Chrome installed.  The speed comes from the fact that in many cases when you hit your own app it is very fast because it is running locally, but since very few servers are running Chrome, speed test tools often return a slower result because they have to hit some poor schmuck’s computer, and if he is at Starbucks that could be slow.

 

:-)

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Ian Wilson

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Aug 2, 2011, 4:38:34 PM8/2/11
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Ikai,

Thank you for the information. I will keep in mind the optimization tips.
Do you guys have local data centers as part of your road map? (I know Amazon recently set up a dedicated center for AWS in Tokyo).

Ian

Ikai Lan (Google)

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Aug 2, 2011, 4:54:31 PM8/2/11
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Our external roadmap is here:


We don't currently have regional data centers on our roadmap, but it's something we're always thinking about.

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Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine



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Robert Kluin

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Aug 2, 2011, 11:39:52 PM8/2/11
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I wonder how many people will think what you said here is true.

Patrick Poon

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Aug 3, 2011, 7:59:53 AM8/3/11
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Ikai,

It sure would be great if Google would consider adding regional data
centers on the roadmap. I live in Boston, but travel to Japan a few
times a year. Most recently, I stayed in Yokohama for the month of
June, actively developing and testing my app the entire month. There
was a noticeable degradation in performance compared to what I
experience in Boston. Not just after calling my app the first time
after a period of non-activity, but even after on-going active use.

The latency didn't make my app unusable but it was noticeable enough
to cause me concern as to how potential customers in Japan might
perceive the speed of my app.

Cheers,

Patrick

Ian Wilson

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Aug 3, 2011, 9:19:07 AM8/3/11
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That is interesting, I will also be testing and developing in Yokohama and Tokyo this month.
I am currently testing from europe but will see how much of a difference there is from Japan.

Gdovicak

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Aug 2, 2011, 6:35:48 PM8/2/11
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That blows away my thought of app engine requests being served by
people running the sdk.
> To view this discussion on the web visithttps://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/atIjL0tAAAYJ.

Ikai Lan (Google)

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Aug 3, 2011, 2:10:17 PM8/3/11
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Patrick, did you follow the page speed advice? The majority of what makes web sites appear slow is the loading of assets and JavaScript execution. Steve Souders (the father of web page speed) has been quoted as saying this can account for up to 90% of web site slowness.

Obviously, the first time visiting a site where nothing is in the cache or if you are serving static assets from North America, this will cause the site to appear slow, but take a look at these best practices the next time you are testing in Japan.

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Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine



Tim Hoffman

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Aug 4, 2011, 8:22:08 AM8/4/11
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I have spent some time with pagespeed lately and all the things it suggests I have no real control over like 
optimising javascript or specifying cache validators etc.....  as all the assets are google or yui  ;-)

e.g.  

The following resources are missing a cache validator. Resources that do not specify a cache validator cannot be refreshed efficiently. Specify a Last-Modified or ETag header to enable cache validation for the following resources:


Arnaldo M Pereira

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Aug 3, 2011, 8:35:38 PM8/3/11
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The latency of requests from Brazil are consistently high, even following all page speed advices.

IMO, the _network_ latency is not-so-rarely unacceptable with datacenters just in US.

Ikai Lan (Google)

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Aug 4, 2011, 1:45:53 PM8/4/11
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Yeah, there are only so many things you can do to make things faster when you have to do cross continent network calls.

While latency is important, what I'm stressing is the user experience. It's more important for your application to feel fast than it is to actually *be* fast. In a perfect world you have both.

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Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine



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