Engineers love to say "global" when they mean "two regions in the same cloud provider". This talk skips the continent-counting contest and focuses on what actually breaks: Cross-border latency spikes, data sovereignty laws that contradict each other, and the uncomfortable truth that your "eventually consistent" database becomes "eventually never" when a cable gets dredged up.

We'll walk through real production failures from systems that genuinely span disparate locations, no spinning globes, no "just use Kafka."

You'll learn:

- Why asymmetric latency (not distance) is your real enemy, and how to measure it before it measures you

- A decision framework for active-active vs. active-passive that doesn't rely on cloud vendor marketing

- One working pattern for data placement when you don't control where your users are