Lowest Latency Cloud Regions — Choosing for Performance

Choosing Regions for Minimum Latency

Application response time is directly impacted by the distance between your servers and your users. Selecting the right region can reduce latency by 100ms or more, significantly improving user experience.

Inter-Region Latency Estimates

Route	Approximate Latency
US East ↔ US West	60-80ms
US East ↔ Europe (Ireland)	70-90ms
US East ↔ Tokyo	150-180ms
US East ↔ Singapore	200-230ms
US East ↔ Sydney	200-230ms
US East ↔ Mumbai	180-220ms
Europe ↔ Tokyo	220-260ms
Europe ↔ Singapore	160-190ms
Tokyo ↔ Singapore	60-80ms
Tokyo ↔ Sydney	100-130ms

Region Selection Strategy

1. Single region: Pick the region closest to the majority of your users. For global audiences with a US concentration, us-east-1 / eastus / us-east1 is the default choice.

2. Two regions: Add a European region (eu-west-1 / northeurope / europe-west1) to cover Europe and serve as DR for US East.

3. Three regions: Add an APAC region (ap-northeast-1 / japaneast / asia-northeast1) to cover Asia.

4. Five+ regions: Add Singapore and Sydney for comprehensive APAC coverage, plus a South American region if needed.

CDN Acceleration

For static content and API responses, a CDN can effectively reduce latency regardless of origin region:

• AWS CloudFront: 450+ edge locations
• Azure Front Door: 180+ edge locations
• GCP Cloud CDN: Uses Google's global edge network

Using a CDN, even a single-region deployment can serve users globally with sub-50ms latency for cached content.