3 ms·

This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just c

by cosmie 7y ago

This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just continues to reinforce what I said at the end of [2], about their business model instilling confidence in leveraging them at a free-tier level. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411

btown 7y ago
Yea, it didn't occur to me either - as implementers we'd be like "why would we want the responsibility of so much scale that we need to support without corresponding revenue," but in their position they can say "we need all the tooling for that scale anyways, why don't we leverage that into better bulk discounts with the interconnections!" And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader.
- cosmie 7y ago
  > And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader. It's basically real world chaos monkeys that are stress testing their systems. Combined with signal intelligence, those chaos monkeys are actively improving their systems. Then, as a final bonus, absorbing the DDoS attacks aimed at those chaos monkeys (and their paid tier) provides a lot of globally diverse and distributed inbound traffic to them, favorably offsetting the outbound traffic they're serving from from their network. Improving their position during interconnect negotiations. There are quite natural synergies that emerge as a product of their particular choices in structuring their business. Which is far more rare of a thing than you'd expect.

3 ms·

This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just c

by cosmie 7y ago

btown 7y ago
Yea, it didn't occur to me either - as implementers we'd be like "why would we want the responsibility of so much scale that we need to support without corresponding revenue," but in their position they can say "we need all the tooling for that scale anyways, why don't we leverage that into better bulk discounts with the interconnections!" And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader.
- cosmie 7y ago
  > And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader. It's basically real world chaos monkeys that are stress testing their systems. Combined with signal intelligence, those chaos monkeys are actively improving their systems. Then, as a final bonus, absorbing the DDoS attacks aimed at those chaos monkeys (and their paid tier) provides a lot of globally diverse and distributed inbound traffic to them, favorably offsetting the outbound traffic they're serving from from their network. Improving their position during interconnect negotiations. There are quite natural synergies that emerge as a product of their particular choices in structuring their business. Which is far more rare of a thing than you'd expect.