Globally deployed applications don't have to be slow. In this post, we'll show you three ways to reduce latency in multi-region deployments, using a sample app we built called Wikifeedia. Wikifeedia is built on top of the public APIs from Wikipedia. It shows users a globally sorted index of content based on the most reviewed content in each language for the previous day. Since its target audience is global, it needs to be accessible from anywhere in the world, with low latency. But, like many news aggregations, the content isn’t changing from second to second. As such, it can tolerate slightly stale data.
The application is hosted on Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine, while the underlying database is hosted using our own Cockroach Cloud managed service offering. As a side note, this application has become a personal favorite of ours as we find ourselves eagerly checking out Wikifeedia to determine what’s trending on Wikipedia in any given day.