Why Switzerland was first in the expansion batch
The first European country in the expansion batch. Why Switzerland made sense as the first country after the UK.
With UK 4 km out the door, the obvious next question was which country came after. The answer was Switzerland, and this post is a quick note on why.
Three reasons it goes first. The pilot density per square kilometre is among the highest in Europe. The terrain is varied enough that a 4 km regional model genuinely outperforms anything global - thermals trigger on south-facing rock faces hours before they fire on the valley floor, and a 13 km cell averages those into mush. And the rectangle is small. End-to-end about 13 minutes of compute on the worker, which means putting Switzerland on top of the live UK schedule does not push the rest of the day around.
The prep work also flushed out one of the right failure modes. Early in the process, an old global env briefly caused a Switzerland run to publish under the UK prefix. That forced the publication resolver to make known domain mappings win over legacy env values, which is exactly the kind of boring operational fix a multi-country API needs before public traffic hits it.
Slovenia, Austria and Czechia followed the same pattern: benchmark the rectangle, publish under the final R2 prefix, add a country-specific heartbeat, then expose the region through the same API contract. Switzerland mattered because it proved that the country-expansion work was mostly configuration, monitoring and scheduling rather than a new product each time.