Gitpod Singapore (sg) region

[ghuntley]

edit: 👋 hey there, please refer to #7489 as the source of truth for supporting more regions than just EU and US.

We have discussed internally regarding creating a new region a few times since the team has expanded to include two employees in Australia but a feature request has never been logged.

I've always found Gitpod workable when connecting from the US or EU clusters from Australia but the experience could be better.

This morning I received customer feedback which has prompted bringing this topic up once again:

I was playing with your GitPod Jetbrains Rider repo over the weekend as we're interested in this space for our development team as it would solve a number of challenges that we have, particularly in the longer term.

I kind of got it working, but to be honest the latency was very noticeable and wouldn't lead to a productive development experience. Some of this is probably down to the workspace being hosted in the states and running Rider in the browser.

I think the GCP Singapore region would be an appropriate choice for expansion for Gitpod. Singapore is also a region for GitHub Codepsaces btw.

nb. I was on 1 bar of Telstra 4G when performing this test.

Request for the Community

If you are from the South-East Asia Region:

1. Head to gcpping.com
2. Share a screenshot of the test result
3. Share which country/city you are from and insights about your network connectivity.

Front conversations

[joshuabezaleel]

Hi Geoff, the name's Joshua from Indonesia. Been a fan of what Gitpod is working on for quite some time. All the best to the Gitpod team. Hope this helps.

[axonasif]

Hi, it feels awesome to know that gitpod is finally going to have a Singaporean cluster! I'm from Bangladesh and I have been using gitpod from a 4G mobile network.
Thanks!

Gcpping.com

Speed test. Net

[glennsarti]

From Perth, Western Australia

Wired VDSL (17/7 down/up Mbps)

Appears my traffic is being routed via East Coast AU instead of direct to Singapore. Rough speed test shows 53ms from me to NewMedia Express SG which is what I'd expect.

[bigint]

From Kerala, India.

Fiber 25 Up and Down (Tried with Jio and Blue Lotus)

[DevEnable]

Melbourne fibre connection (not NBN).

[svenefftinge]

Cool! thanks for all the comments. Let's do this!
@meysholdt can you take over and share a plan for rolling this out?

[meysholdt]

happy to do so. There are two possible setups for this:
a) setup a workspace-cluster in Singapore, hook it up to the us-meta-cluster and have have our server component route starting workspaces to the geographically closest workspace cluster (Singapore or US).
b) setup a workspace-clusters, a meta-clusters, and a database in Singapore and have the GCP LoadBalancer route users to the geographically closest region.

I'm in favour of (a) because it is the way to go if we want to support more than three regions: it has lower cloud costs, lower operational effort and more control over workspace-routing, etc.

However, our server (or bridge) component does not yet support geography(e.g. latency) based routing and we need to decide if that's a feature we we want to implement now.

[bigint]

However, our server (or bridge) component does not yet support geography(e.g. latency) based routing and we need to decide if that's a feature we want to implement now.

@meysholdt If that sounds difficult, it would be great to add a preference in user settings to choose the data center they want. WDYT?

[meysholdt]

If that sounds difficult,

it's not sooo difficult, but it requires an internal discussion about priorities and distributing the work.

Here is a proposal (for solution (a)) on how we could do automated latency-based workspace-cluster-selection: #5596

it would be great to add a preference in user settings to choose the data center they want. WDYT?

I think it would be awesome if users would not need to make this decision. But either way, maybe some want to make the decision. it's up to @svenefftinge if our product should allow users to manually chose a region.