There are certain industries that greatly benefit from high-performing, low-latency, geo-distributed technologies, while other organizations might be more focused on vertically scaling architectures. This is dependent on numerous factors including the data pipeline, network, data structure, type of product or solution, short and long-term goals, etc. While there are currently many databases and tools that provide vertical scaling capabilities, there are not many that focus on horizontal scaling -- but there’s still a need for both.
Latency
Before jumping into specific industries that benefit from high-performing, low-latency, geo-distributed databases (it’s a mouthful, I know), let’s define a few terms here. High-performing is pretty self-explanatory so I’ll skip over that one. For the next term, I’ll refer to my colleague Jacob Cohen’s blog on Geo-Distributed Databases. Latency generally measures the duration between an action and a response. In user-facing applications, that can be narrowed down to the delay between when a user makes a request and when the application responds to a request. So, technologies that enable low latency usually improve performance and response times, leading to improved user experience and cost savings.