5 ms·

Interesting read. Can someone explain this point to me? "Software-defined networking means that google.com appears to be one hop away" One hop from...? Everywhe

Interesting read. Can someone explain this point to me? "Software-defined networking means that google.com appears to be one hop away" One hop from...? Everywhere? Each server? How does that help? I understand 'traceroute' but not where that single hop to Google comes in and why that's great.

pbbakkum 11y ago
Sure - this isn't really a dimension of comparison, just something that I found interesting / surprising. It seems like SDN is probably the future, and this is an illustration of how its different.
obulpathi 11y ago
Yep. That's right.Google has built their custom networking. It's like when a machine A sends packet to machine B, the packet is handed over to Google SDN (Software-defined Network), which carries to over their private network and then injects the packet into machine B. Googles network is an order of magnitude faster compared to AWS.
- StreamBright 11y ago
  You mean if AWS has 50ms data center latency than GCP has 5ms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster. Reference: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-comp...
    - otterley 11y ago
      What did you use to copy the file? If you used scp, your results are invalid and you must re-run the test again with a different protocol: you can't take advantage of large TCP window sizes with it because ssh uses a small, fixed send/receive buffer size. scp will penalize the performance of large transfers over high-latency links, even if the bandwidth between them is high.
StreamBright 11y ago
He probably "measured" it within GCP. :)

pbbakkum 11y ago

Sure - this isn't really a dimension of comparison, just something that I found interesting / surprising. It seems like SDN is probably the future, and this is an illustration of how its different.

obulpathi 11y ago

Yep. That's right.Google has built their custom networking. It's like when a machine A sends packet to machine B, the packet is handed over to Google SDN (Software-defined Network), which carries to over their private network and then injects the packet into machine B. Googles network is an order of magnitude faster compared to AWS.

StreamBright 11y ago
You mean if AWS has 50ms data center latency than GCP has 5ms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster. Reference: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-comp...
  - otterley 11y ago
    What did you use to copy the file? If you used scp, your results are invalid and you must re-run the test again with a different protocol: you can't take advantage of large TCP window sizes with it because ssh uses a small, fixed send/receive buffer size. scp will penalize the performance of large transfers over high-latency links, even if the bandwidth between them is high.

StreamBright 11y ago

He probably "measured" it within GCP. :)