Bonjour, Paris

Skapi now runs in France. Paris is our newest region, and it is the first place in Europe where a project's database, its files and its user accounts all live on European ground.

Salut, bonjour, and a proper welcome to every developer building from France and the rest of Europe. You have been shipping real applications on Skapi with the nearest region thousands of kilometres away, and your users have been paying for that distance on every single request. That stops today.

The first European region

Until this week, the closest Skapi region to a user in Lyon was in Mumbai, 6,813 km away. 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.

Paris changes the shape of that map. Here is what the same requests look like now:

A user in Berlin now sits about one seventh of the distance from their data. 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.

Where Skapi runs

Five regions across North 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.

Read that list from west to east and the spacing is deliberate. Oregon anchors the Americas. Paris now 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 European 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

This is the part we are most pleased to hand over. When you create a project, you pick the region.

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 Seoul with an audience in Marseille, put the project in Paris. If you are three founders in Paris selling to Singapore, put it in Singapore. 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 Paris project announces itself as eu73... 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, and in Europe it tends to be the first reason anyone asks about. A project created in Paris keeps its database records, its uploaded files, its hosted site and its user accounts in France. Not routed through it. Stored in it.

For a great many teams building for European customers, that single sentence is the one that unblocks the project.

Bienvenue

A new region is one of the most satisfying things we get to build. Nothing about your code changes, no new API appears, and yet every user of every project in that part of the world has a better time from the moment it opens. The work disappears into the experience, which is exactly where infrastructure belongs.

So: create a project, choose Paris, and let your French and European users feel what their applications were capable of all along.

Bienvenue à bord. Bon développement, et à très bientôt.