Lets refresh the definitions of Bandwidth and Latency before we deep dive into the topic. Bandwidth refers to the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted per second over a network connection — for example when we speak 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, or 1 Gbps. It’s essentially the capacity of the network, not how fast data actually moves.
On the other hand, latency is the time delay it takes for data to travel from one point to another — typically measured in milliseconds (ms). If you imagine a water pipe, bandwidth is the width of the pipe (how much water can flow through at once), while latency is the delay between turning on the tap and water starting to flow. Lower latency means faster response times and a smoother user experience.
🌍 Latency and Cloud Region Selection
When deploying applications in the cloud, one of the main considerations is proximity to users. Hosting your services closer to customers helps minimize latency. However, customers might be spread across the globe, or perhaps not located near any specific cloud region.
For example, if your main server is hosted in Singapore but your users are in Mumbai, every request must travel the distance between those two locations — adding noticeable latency.
⚡ Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
This issue is solved by Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). A CDN stores cached copies of your content (such as web pages, images, or videos) on servers distributed across multiple network Edge locations. When a user in Mumbai accesses any site, the CDN serves the content from the nearest local server — instead of fetching it from Singapore.
This approach:
Enhances user experience, especially for media-rich or high-traffic websites.
Reduces latency, since data travels a shorter distance.
Decreases load on your origin servers, improving scalability and reliability.
Google’s cloud CDN runs of globally distributed edge points to reduce network latency by caching content closer to users. By adding CDN to global HTTP load balancer, whenever a request is served from CLOUD CDN cache, the load balancer does not need to route to backend infrastructure. So users can enjoy faster and smoother web experience.
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