One of the fundamental concepts underpinning cloud computing is that the location of the servers and other physical infrastructure running the software and storing the data is entirely irrelevant.
That’s why it borrowed the metaphor of the cloud from old telecoms network diagrams, in which the telephone network (and later the internet) was represented by a cloud, to show that the technologies and locations of this part didn’t matter.
But it turns out that geography matters quite a lot when it comes to cloud computing. While the — mostly US-based — big cloud computing companies envisaged giant economies of scale by delivering services to customers from datacenters anywhere in the world, it hasn’t quite turned out that way.
