Comment by danpalmer
8 hours ago
In my experience it has been relatively high variance – it does get as low as 0.5, but can be 3-4. That's an order of magnitude difference, and can be the difference between a great and a terrible UX when you amplify it across many RPCs.
In general the goal should be to deploy as much of the stack in one zone as possible, and have multiple zones for redundancy.
AWS publish their own metrics for cross-AZ and internal-AZ latency: https://eu-central-1.console.aws.amazon.com/nip/ (Network Manager > Infrastructure Performance)
> In general the goal should be to deploy as much of the stack in one zone as possible
Agree. The can be a few downsides one has to consider if you have to fail over to another zone. Worst case, there isn't sufficient capacity available when you fail over if everyone else is asking for capacity at the same time. If one uses e.g. karpenter, you should be able to be very diverse in the instance selection process, so that you get at least some capacity, but maybe not the preferred.