Olá, São Paulo
Skapi now runs in Brazil. São Paulo is our newest region, and it is the first place in South America where a project's database, its files and its user accounts all live on the same continent as the people using them.
Olá, Brasil! Olá, América Latina! A partir de hoje, a Skapi roda em São Paulo. Se você cria aplicações para usuários no Brasil ou em qualquer canto da América Latina, eles não precisam mais cruzar meio mundo a cada requisição: o banco de dados, os arquivos e as contas do seu projeto ficam pertinho, e cada login, cada consulta e cada upload responde bem mais rápido. Um abraço, e bom código!
The first South American region
Until now, the closest Skapi region to a user in Rio de Janeiro was in Paris, 9,167 km away on the other side of the Atlantic. A user in Lima was sent to Oregon, 7,720 km to the north. Every login, every query, every file upload made that journey and came back. It worked, and it worked well, but physics always took its cut.
São Paulo changes the shape of that map. Here is what the same requests look like now:
| Your user is in | To São Paulo | Nearest region before |
|---|---|---|
| Rio de Janeiro | 361 km | 9,167 km (Paris) |
| Belo Horizonte | 491 km | 8,913 km (Paris) |
| Porto Alegre | 852 km | 10,254 km (Paris) |
| Brasília | 872 km | 8,725 km (Paris) |
| Buenos Aires | 1,675 km | 10,852 km (Oregon) |
| Santiago | 2,585 km | 10,099 km (Oregon) |
| Lima | 3,454 km | 7,720 km (Oregon) |
| Bogotá | 4,328 km | 6,339 km (Oregon) |
A user in Rio de Janeiro is now twenty-five times closer to their data. A user in Buenos Aires, six times closer. That difference is not a benchmark you have to squint at. It is the feeling of a page that loads before the spinner has a reason to appear, a form that saves the instant it is submitted, and a file that starts downloading rather than thinking about it first.
From Colombia and Venezuela south, São Paulo is now the nearest region by a wide margin. Users in Mexico and most of Central America are still closest to Oregon, and Skapi keeps offering Oregon first there.
Where Skapi runs
Six regions across North America, South America, Europe and Asia, placed so that most of the connected world has a Skapi region within a short hop.
Every dot is a full Skapi region running the complete stack.
| Region | Where it is | Project ID starts with |
|---|---|---|
| us-west-2 | Oregon, United States | us72 |
| sa-east-1 | São Paulo, Brazil | sa31 |
| eu-west-3 | Paris, France | eu73 |
| ap-south-1 | Mumbai, India | ap51 |
| ap-southeast-1 | Singapore | ap41 |
| ap-northeast-2 | Seoul, South Korea | ap22 |
Read that list from west to east and the spacing is deliberate. Oregon anchors North America, and São Paulo now does the same for South America. Paris covers Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Mumbai, Singapore and Seoul carry the largest concentration of internet users on the planet between them.
Every one of those regions runs the same Skapi. The same SDK call, the same API, the same authentication, the same record model. There is no South American edition with fewer features and no waiting for a region to catch up. A region is either serving your project completely or it is not serving it at all.
Now you choose where your project lives
When you create a project, you pick the region.
The new-project dialog. The closest region is offered first, every region is in the list, and the note under it says the one thing to know before you continue.
Skapi offers you the closest one first, worked out from where you are, so the fast choice is also the default choice. But the list is right there, and the right answer is often not your own city. If you are a studio in Lisbon with an audience in Rio, put the project in São Paulo. If you are three founders in São Paulo selling to Madrid, put it in Paris. Your users are the ones making the round trip thousands of times a day. You make it twice.
Pick deliberately, because a project stays where you put it. The region is baked into the first four characters of the project ID, which is why a São Paulo project announces itself as sa31... for the rest of its life. It is a permanent decision in the same way a good foundation is permanent.
Data that stays where you put it
There is a second reason to care about a region. A project created in São Paulo keeps its database records, its uploaded files, its hosted site and its user accounts in Brazil. Not routed through it. Stored in it.
For teams whose customers ask where their data is kept, and for anyone working under the LGPD, Brazil's data protection law, that single sentence is usually the one that unblocks the project.
Why São Paulo means so much to us
A new region is always satisfying to open, but this one means more to us than most, for two reasons.
The first is reach. South America is home to hundreds of millions of people who live on their phones, and until now every one of them was a long way from any Skapi project. That distance showed up in your business as slower pages, abandoned forms and users who quietly gave up. With São Paulo, your product can reach them properly. It loads faster, it saves faster, and it feels like it was built for them, because now it runs right next to them.
The second is cost. Running a traditional server backend on AWS in South America is expensive, noticeably more so than the same servers in North America or Europe, and that cost alone has kept many teams from serving the region well, or at all. We made sure a Skapi project in São Paulo runs at a fraction of that price. Making that possible was a real challenge for us, and it took a lot more than flipping a switch. That story deserves its own space, so we will cover it in the next article.
So: create a project, choose São Paulo, and let your Brazilian and Latin American users feel what their applications were capable of all along.
Bem-vindos a bordo. Bom desenvolvimento, e até breve.
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