How can we ensure users connect to the nearest ECS cluster?

Hi Elvis,

Part of the ECS planning process should include designing your load balancing infrastructure.  While it's true that every ECS node can serve content from the global namespace, there are may ways to distribute load between all of your ECS nodes.

If you want to ensure users connect to the nearest ECS clusters, you could define separate endpoints for each region, e.g. apj.ecs.example.com and emea.ecs.example.com and set those as your BaseURLs in the console.  In this configuration, users could manually pick the endpoint closest to them.  If you wanted the geography selection to be automatic, you could use a geographic load balancer like a Riverbed SteelApp that can intercept the DNS requests and route users to the closest endpoint.

Within a site, it's also important to implement a load balancing infrastructure to distribute load between your ECS nodes.  Since there are many ways to design this (different levels of redundancy, different load balancing algorithms, different workloads, SSL termination, etc), it is not something that is included with the ECS appliance.