Regions and RDP latency: picking the right one

Cloud desktops aren't like web pages — they don't load once and sit there. Every mouse move, every keystroke, every rendered pixel travels between your device and the server. That round-trip time (RTT) is what makes a session feel snappy or sluggish. Where your session runs, physically, sets the floor on how good that experience can be.

The physics

RTT is a function of distance. The closer the server, the better it feels. Approximate round-trip times from a handful of major cities to AWS regions:

• Nairobi → af-south-1 (Cape Town): ~130 ms
• Nairobi → eu-west-1 (Dublin): ~140–180 ms
• Nairobi → us-east-1 (N. Virginia): ~260–320 ms
• Cape Town → af-south-1: single-digit ms
• Johannesburg → af-south-1: ~15 ms
• San Francisco → us-east-1: ~70 ms
• San Francisco → us-east-2 (Ohio): ~50 ms
• Dublin → eu-west-1: ~10 ms
• Mumbai → ap-south-1: ~10 ms

RDP starts feeling sluggish above ~80 ms of round-trip and gets uncomfortable above ~200 ms. That's not subjective — it's how much lag humans notice on cursor and keyboard input in real-time interactive workloads.

What this means for your region pick

Pick the AWS region closest to where you'll actually be using the session. DeskBoot supports five regions across four continents:

• us-east-1 (N. Virginia) — US East Coast and much of the eastern seaboard
• us-east-2 (Ohio) — central US, and a good alternative when us-east-1 has a capacity blip
• eu-west-1 (Dublin) — Europe, UK, West Africa
• ap-south-1 (Mumbai) — South Asia
• af-south-1 (Cape Town) — Southern and Eastern Africa

If you're in North America, one of the US regions is right. If you're in Europe, pick Dublin. If you're in India, pick Mumbai. If you're in most of Africa, Cape Town will be closest. If you're between two regions, run a quick ping from your machine to something like ec2.<region>.amazonaws.com and use the lower RTT.

What region choice affects

• Latency: the main one. Everything above.
• Public IP location: your session's IP geo-locates to the region. Matters for services that geo-fence.
• Data residency: your encrypted disk and any files you create live in the region you launched in. Terminated with the session.
• Compliance: some regulated workloads have data-locality requirements. Pick the region that matches those.

What region choice does not affect

• Pricing: identical across regions on DeskBoot. Some cloud providers charge more for certain regions; we don't.
• OS availability: mostly identical. A few Marketplace-published images (Kali, for example) aren't listed in every region — the launch form calls those combinations out and disables them.
• Feature availability: static IPs, per-second billing, auto-stop, all work identically in every region.

The short version

Region choice is one setting that has an outsized effect on how the product feels. Thirty seconds of thought before you launch pays off every subsequent minute of use. Pick the closest one, or the one whose IP location matches what you need — everything else is region-independent.