Useful notes for building products that last.

Stop Pretending Your Data is Local: The Optical Illusion of Nepal's Internet

Let's get one thing straight: the "cloud" is just a buzzword for somebody else's computer. If you look at Nepal’s internet traffic, over 70% of residential bandwidth never leaves the country. People see that and think, "Great, our digital infrastructure is domestic!" This is complete garbage. The only reason those packets stay in Nepal is because video files are fat, and international transit bandwidth is expensive. It's an economic optimization, not a sovereign engineering choice. Local caches from global CDNs keep the heavy video bits inside the border to save money. But where does the actual thinking happen? Where is the control plane? Where does your application logic come from? Where is your telemetry being stored? It’s sitting in a foreign cloud data center. Welcome to the architecture of illusion: local platform, foreign brain.