yes, you can pick a cloud provider and region, and you can deploy replicas to other regions

That's a bit vague isn't it? Certainly that does not mean putting something guaranteed even in the same data center, let alone the same rack.

Vague how? Your issue is that the major cloud providers can’t tell you where specifically your server is located? I don’t get it

Well... yea. A db is nice and all, but if you can't predictably host it somewhere where you can finely control the latency, you're gonna suffer.

	▲	sgammon 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		with long-running TLS connections this really isn't an issue; turn keepalives on and the connection generally stays hot. grpc over TLS also means features like resumption / TLS ticketing also work. i used to think this way, and then i tried it, and i have to admit it's pretty good. think of all the complexity on the other side of running a stable multi-regional database: networking, disk failure, routing, caching. all of that is negated. so yes, there is some latency, but not as much as you think, and honestly, i'd make the trade again in a heartbeat.