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Region Selection

Region Selection

5
posts
2024–2026

Modal now allows users to select the cloud region where their Functions execute, offering granular control over deployment locations. This feature supports specifying regions at various levels of detail, from broad continents to specific data centers, to meet regulatory requirements, reduce egress fees, and minimize latency by co-locating compute with data or users. The implementation involves a simple code-based configuration, enabling users to direct their workloads to desired geographical zones. This post details the rollout of a new, geographically distributed I/O plane that further reduces latency by routing Function inputs and outputs through regional I/O servers, complementing the existing region selection for container execution. End-to-end Function Call latencies have dropped by approximately 80ms at p50 due to this new I/O plane.

2026

Bringing serverless functions closer to the speed of wire | Modal Blog

8/4/2026

Introduced a new, geographically distributed I/O plane that routes Function inputs and outputs through regional I/O servers, reducing network latency for Function Calls. This involved a complete redesign of the I/O system, rewriting the server layer in Go for better concurrency, and optimizing interactions with shared storage. The migration of all Functions to use the new I/O plane in us-east has resulted in an approximate 80ms reduction in p50 end-to-end Function Call latencies. Also provided best practices for users to further optimize performance, including selecting the closest `routing_region`, managing payload sizes, and batching inputs.

2025

Product updates: Logs v2, live container profiling, and region selection on all plans

2/14/2025

Region selection is now available on all Modal plans, previously limited to specific tiers. This expands access to granular control over deployment locations for meeting regulatory requirements, reducing egress fees, and minimizing latency.

2024

Dogfooding Modal: What we learned at our internal hackathon

12/9/2024

A hackathon project called Glodal demonstrated a prototype of a distributed control plane that significantly reduces latency (from 268ms to 3ms) by keeping client requests and worker communication within the same continent, validating the benefits for future platform development. This project builds upon the existing region selection feature by exploring a more advanced latency optimization strategy.

Product updates: Datadog integration, lower function latency & more

7/9/2024

This post announces the ability to select specific cloud regions for function execution, building upon the existing region selection feature. It highlights the benefits of regulatory compliance, cost control, and latency reduction through co-location.

Introducing: Region selection

5/13/2024

Introduced the capability for users to specify the cloud region for their Modal Functions. This is achieved through a new `region` parameter in the `@app.function` decorator, which accepts region strings with varying granularity (e.g., 'us', 'us-east', 'us-east-1'). The system supports specifying multiple regions for increased flexibility and faster cold starts. This feature is available on Team and Enterprise plans and addresses use cases related to regulatory compliance, cost optimization (egress fees), and latency reduction.