afford the cost of an intermediate proxy</li></ul><p>In all these cases, the proxy is not different from any low-level plumbing layer. In fact, the latency introduced can be far higher because the same level of optimizations won’t be available to a proxy.</p><p>To illustrate this with an example, consider the application shown below. It consists of a Python app and a set of memcached servers behind it. An upstream memcached server is selected based on connection time routing. Speed is the primary concern 