Technology cloud regions

Following is an interesting high-level statistics, for the regional deployment of cloud services, on cloud platforms of few reputed vendors:

IBM Cloud:
The following regions are supported.
us-south
us-east
au-syd
eu-gb
eu-de

GCP:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/

AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/

Following is my analytical sense of this:
1) GCP and AWS provide many more cloud regions than IBM Cloud. The region coverage of GCP and AWS is almost same. A region is a particular geographic area where the cloud data-center is located. The user fetching the cloud hosted application from their nearest region, will result in lower latency and higher throughput. All cloud vendors provide an option to the merchant, to select the region where they'd like to host their cloud applications.
2) IBM supporting fewer regions, may even be good from the perspective of simplicity. IBM cloud regions seems to be uniformly distributed around the world. If building a truly global cloud hosted application, having fewer regions to think about may be a good thing. With this, it may be necessary to optimize the application at other parts of the infrastructure.
3) Although AWS is quite good for various reasons, it doesn't offer all services at all its regions. But overall, AWS is ok on this aspect.

XML vs. JSON discussion

In this article, https://www.xml.com/articles/2017/08/06/xml-vs-json-discussion/ G. Ken Holman very nicely explains the pros and cons of XML vs. JSON data formats. In this article, Ken seems not at all biased towards XML or JSON. I'm sure people having this concern will find the cited article useful.

Apache software mirrors

If you're interested to download software releases from Apache Software Foundation, you'd need to use one of the Apache mirror sites for the download. Usually, the download page of respective Apache project will present the user with the closest mirrors to the user's location. But sparingly, the mirror site presented by the project download page might not be responding (i.e there could be some problem with a specific mirror, like it may be down). You might then wonder, what should I do now, and I need this software?

Following is a handy site, to see the runtime status of all Apache mirrors: https://www.apache.org/mirrors/. Any mirror can be fully navigated via this link. Each mirror hosts all Apache projects. In a sparing situation, that the project download page presents with a non-responsive mirror, the users could go to the site https://www.apache.org/mirrors/ and download software from there by choosing an alternative mirror, and navigating to the respective project.

Usually, various Apache software download pages, allow user to select certain alternative mirrors. Refreshing the Apache project download pages usually also presents alternative mirror sites. If that solves the problem, then going to https://www.apache.org/mirrors/ for download may not be necessary.

I hope this could help someone, while downloading Apache softwares.