in the modern world extra network hops, novel userland network stacks, and additional cycles of decrypted/re-encrypting traffic make your apps go faster, not slower.
Not sure if it's ironic or not. Because it should be not.
AES-NI gives you encryption at the speed of memcpy basically. Userland network stacks are faster because they don't incur the kernel call cost. With that, if your NIC drivers support zero-copy access, an extra hop to a machine in the same rack over a 10G link is barely noticeable, may be shorter than an L3 miss.
The cost of this is mostly more hardware and more power used, but not much or any additional latency.
