Selecting a region for Firestore

[wekaso...@gmail.com]

There is a significant difference in the Firestore prices e.g. a 54% increase in read price for multi-region (eur) vs single location. https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/pricing#us

What are the benefits vs risks?  

More chance of a technical outage and loss of availability I guess being the main one.

I don't think its worth it for my use case to pay for the extra availability.

My application is going to start in New Zealand and then take over the world.

Given that we have more sheep than people and there is a much larger market overseas I was looking at using a US or European location for Firestore.

Is there a significant speed difference based on Firestore location vs location of user, any regulatory difference in regions that I need to be aware of?

Most websites seem to be located in the US so I would think that would be the safer option and us-east would be closer to Europe so maybe Carolina or Virginia?

Assuming I went single rather than multi-region. 

Anyone had experience in making this decision?

[Sam Stern]

You're right that the primary difference is availability. The single region deployments hav 99.99% availability while multi-region is 99.999%.  So that's the difference between 5m and 50m of downtime per year.  Of course multi-region deployments are also more durable in case of a true disaster.  If you read this documentation you'll notice that it's theoretically possible for an entire region to be lost due to a natural disaster.  To lose a multi-regional dataset with a strongly consistent service like Cloud Firestore you'd need to get really unlucky, like 3 meteors hitting different regions at the same time unlucky :-)

As for speed the benefits of being closer to your users are pretty easy to estimate, I have found this (unofficial) tool to be a helpful guide in the past https://gcping.com/

So here in London on my 5g cellular connection I am ~70ms away from the closest GCP region (europe-west) and ~400ms from the farthest (asia-south).  As for regulatory issues it's best to speak to a lawyer, the people on this mailing list are mostly engineers and product managers and we're not qualified to give that kind of advice.

Hope that's helpful!

- Sam

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[wekaso...@gmail.com]

Sam,

Thanks for that.  The gcping link was extremely helpful.  

I got several friends to test from various locations around the world and it is not always based on distance (although mostly).  I guess it depends on the cabling.

Anyway it validated my initial thoughts and I will likely go with South Carolina.

Cheers,

Flon