I cannot find documentation as to how the cloud is architected. Say I have an Argon sitting in Australia, and I want to send a message up to the cloud, and then to a web hook of mine. Does that poor message have to travel halfway around the globe to a Particle Server in US AWS?
Or
Would it hit a particle cloud server in country (or near by), to which I can also host a server in country (or near by) to service that webhook request? Typical cloud goodness stuff with name resolution to the closest server.
Does it all just live in the US or is it more distributed yet?
The Particle cloud currently exists only in the United States (Amazon East) so all traffic will transit through there.
Additionally, for cellular devices, the data may transit through another location. For example, for the Electron and E Series, it’s Spain. I believe the Boron 2G/3G is the UK, and for LTE devices the United States.
However, given typical use cases for Particle.publish and webhooks, the latency to travel across the world over the Internet is far less than other latency in the system, especially for cellular.
One of the ways to reduce latency is to use the server-sent-events stream (SSE) instead of webhooks. With SSE, you make a TLS connection to the Particle cloud and the connection is kept open. The events are pushed down this channel as they arrive in the cloud. With webhooks, when an event matches a webhook, the request is queued, a DNS lookup is done (if you’re using a hostname), a TCP connection made, and a TLS/SSL authentication is done, all of which takes much longer than just pushing the event payload down the SSE stream.