Resumen
Over the past several years, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has become an attractive option for companies looking to save money and simplify their computing infrastructures. SaaS is an interesting group of techniques for moving computing from the desktop to the cloud. However, as it grows in popularity, engineers should be aware of some of the fundamental limitations they face when developing these kinds of distributed applications -- in particular, the finite speed of light. This article answers the question on the basic principles related to speed of light and network hops that all software developers should be acquainted with by first working out some quantitative preliminaries with an example, then moving on to the networking implications, and then covering applications. Propagation delay is an important physical limit. This measure is often given short shrift in system design as application architectures evolve, but may have more performance impact on real distributed applications than bandwidth, the most commonly used figure of merit for networks.