A typical server configuration might begin by selecting the region where the physical server is located. A local business would have no issue selecting the closest region to their store, but businesses with traffic spanning cities, countries, or even the entire globe might struggle to serve all their customers. This is where the ZEIT Smart CDN comes in.

Automatic Edge CDN

When an application is deployed to ZEIT Now, it automatically serves static files and caches responses in all of our CDN Regions across the globe. Serverless functions will execute in the nearest Origin Region to the developer by default. The developer can choose which Origin Regions to deploy to by using --regions in the CLI or the regions key in a now.json file.

Origin vs Edge Regions

An Origin Region is a Region where content originates, whereas an Edge Region can only serve cached or static content. An application should generally only deploy to the Origin Regions closest to the Regions where the data is stored.

Providers

Most applications developed in the cloud only ever see one cloud. When using ZEIT Now, the sky's the limit. Our CDN abstracts away cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The most exciting benefit of multi-cloud is that you do not rely solely on a single cloud provider, providing far greater reliability.

Outage Resiliency

If an Edge Region goes down, an application's traffic gets rerouted to another Edge Region. If an Origin Region goes down, anything deployed to that Region automatically gets redeployed in a healthy Region.

To further increase our coverage and resiliency, we plan to utilize more cloud providers in the future and continue expanding our Regions.

Routing

The ZEIT Now Platform acts as a Universal API and Overlay Network on top of existing cloud infrastructure providers.

Region ID
Reference Location
Provider Region (Routing)
Provider Region (Now Serverless Functions)
Origin/Edge
arn1
Stockholm, Sweden
AWS eu-north-1
AWS eu-north-1
Origin
bom1
Mumbai, India
AWS ap-south-1
AWS ap-south-1
Origin
bru1
Brussels, Belgium, Europe
GCP europe-west1
AWS eu-central-1
Origin
cdg1
Paris, France, Europe
AWS eu-west-3
AWS eu-west-3
Origin
chs1
Charleston, East US
GCP us-east1
n/a
Edge
cle1
Cleveland, East US
AWS us-east-2
AWS us-east-2
Origin
dub1
Dublin, Ireland
AWS eu-west-1
AWS eu-west-1
Origin
gru1
São Paulo, Brazil
AWS sa-east-1
AWS sa-east-1
Origin
hel1
Helsinki, Finland
GCP europe-north1
n/a
Edge
hkg1
Hong Kong
GCP asia-east2
n/a
Edge
hnd1
Tokyo, Japan
AWS ap-northeast-1
AWS ap-northeast-1
Origin
iad1
Washington DC, USA
AWS us-east-1
AWS us-east-1
Origin
icn1
Seoul, South Korea
AWS ap-northeast-2
AWS ap-northeast-2
Origin
lax1
Los Angeles, West US
GCP us-west2
n/a
Edge
lhr1
London, UK
AWS eu-west-2
AWS eu-west-2
Origin
oma1
Omaha, Central US
GCP us-central1
n/a
Edge
pdx1
Portland, West US
AWS us-west-2
AWS us-west-2
Origin
sfo1
San Francisco, CA, USA
AWS us-west-1
AWS us-west-1
Origin
sin1
Singapore
AWS ap-southeast-1
AWS ap-southeast-1
Origin
syd1
Sydney, Australia
AWS ap-southeast-2
AWS ap-southeast-2
Origin
tpe1
Taipei, Taiwan
GCP asia-east1
n/a
Edge
yul1
Montreal, Canada
GCP northamerica-northeast1
n/a
Edge
zrh1
Zurich, Switzerland
GCP europe-west6
n/a
Edge

During development via now dev, the region is assigned dev1 to mimic the ZEIT Now Platform infrastructure.

Region ID
Reference Location
dev1
localhost