Ping to Google Cloud from Buenos Aires @ Lyoneel.dev

I searched this information in Google without luck, and because are very specific I decided to get them by myself

Why should I care?

Depends on the usage of VM, latency can change service experience, sometimes just the speed, and sometimes just destroys the experience. An example can be a video-game multiplayer server, where latency can be annoying or just make it unplayable.

What latency means?

Latency is the way to measure the time a packet takes to go from source to destination, plus the time that takes response to arrive. It is measured in milliseconds (ms), latency can be affected by multiple factors, in this article we will be focusing only on physical distances and two different internet service providers.

Which options do I have?

Google Cloud Compute offers different zones to create virtual machines, not so long ago Google added datacenters in South America, and is planned to add one more in Central America. Many VM providers exist, but this article focuses only on Google service.

This data is for reference only, the values may vary due to many factors.

Latencies at 2023.03

Pricing E2 Micro per month 24/7 at 2023.03

How this data is obtained?

This data is obtained using 50 data packets sent to every VM created exclusively for this test in each zone. I used "ping" tool in a console GNU/Linux from a laptop connected to the internet using an ethernet cable. These VMs had minimal configuration: type E2 Micro, OS Debian GNU/Linux 11, balanced persistent disk. VMs are "empty." None of them has any additional process running.

Final thoughts

There is no one answer for this, you have to take in account these three elements:

Latency
Services availability
Pricing

Latency in South America is lower, if that is your main concern Santiago is the best option, but…

There is plenty of Google Cloud services that are not available in Santiago , in those cases potentially São Paulo is the best option, there is a possibility that the service you are looking for are not available São Paulo, is less likely to happen in Brazil, in Santiago a lot of services are missing.

Pricing is higher in South America if the pricing is the most important for you, and your service can handle more latency, you can use US-East. The price difference in an instance E2 Micro is not much, but this difference scales up when you have more instances or more powerful VMs.

Thanks for reading!

Namaste.