4 ms·

Is it pretty much dead? Yeah, if you’re moving FAANG level traffic you need something more fancy than LAMP + an internet connection, but I’ve seen dozens and do

by 542458 5y ago

Is it pretty much dead? Yeah, if you’re moving FAANG level traffic you need something more fancy than LAMP + an internet connection, but I’ve seen dozens and dozens of sites with a plain old no-cdn, no-pdn, LAMP tech stack. Working with startups might bias your view - lots of companies are running extremely boring setups and they work just great.

nabla9 5y ago
Respectfully, I think you miss the point. The fact that 98% of traffic goes trough this new infrastructure, allows some still plug their server to the net raw and their traffic still gets trough.
- starfallg 5y ago
  >The fact that 98% of traffic goes trough this new infrastructure Doesn't mean that 98% of the value of the Internet results from this traffic. Even if you discount all of the web, there still lots of applications using the federated model (e.g. SMTP) or peer-to-peer (e.g. Crypto, VOIP), that require end-to-end connectivity.
  - nabla9 5y ago
    You expand this discussion into completely new direction. My original point is about capacity and if the old internet could work today. It seems like I'm correct, but I'm not so sure. I would like to see other opinions. Every response so far is "there exists". The real issue is if the internet could do everything without caching data near the edge.
- 1_person 5y ago
  The traffic goes through this "new infrastructure" not out of necessity but because it's free and allows the user to pretend like a number of problems don't exist. Terrestrial optical networks operate far, far below capacity to create artificial scarcity, which is to a certain extent necessary to recoup the capital expenditures in a competitive market, and is to a certain extent an abuse of an under-regulated natural monopoly. If you could eliminate all adversarial factors and put every data service subscriber's payment for a single month into a pool, and that pool purchased only transceivers, passive optics and switches, and this hardware was distributed to every network operator perfectly fairly based on its contribution to the global maximization of available network capacity, then the delivered capacity to the end user could increase by something like 4.5 orders of magnitude with no substantial change in topology or subscriber or provider costs afterwards using the existing fiber, with a few more orders of magnitude possible with a fatter tree before the backbone costs explode. With DWDM you can carry 100+ channels of 100Gbps over a single fiber today, with commodity, off the shelf components. Most fiber in the ground today is probably still lit with a single wave of 10G, if it's not just dark. This distribution model is not even remotely a technical necessity, it's an arbitrary local minima reached largely by exploitative market distortions and adversarial economics.

by 542458 5y ago

nabla9 5y ago

Respectfully, I think you miss the point. The fact that 98% of traffic goes trough this new infrastructure, allows some still plug their server to the net raw and their traffic still gets trough.

starfallg 5y ago
>The fact that 98% of traffic goes trough this new infrastructure Doesn't mean that 98% of the value of the Internet results from this traffic. Even if you discount all of the web, there still lots of applications using the federated model (e.g. SMTP) or peer-to-peer (e.g. Crypto, VOIP), that require end-to-end connectivity.
- nabla9 5y ago
  You expand this discussion into completely new direction. My original point is about capacity and if the old internet could work today. It seems like I'm correct, but I'm not so sure. I would like to see other opinions. Every response so far is "there exists". The real issue is if the internet could do everything without caching data near the edge.
1_person 5y ago
The traffic goes through this "new infrastructure" not out of necessity but because it's free and allows the user to pretend like a number of problems don't exist. Terrestrial optical networks operate far, far below capacity to create artificial scarcity, which is to a certain extent necessary to recoup the capital expenditures in a competitive market, and is to a certain extent an abuse of an under-regulated natural monopoly. If you could eliminate all adversarial factors and put every data service subscriber's payment for a single month into a pool, and that pool purchased only transceivers, passive optics and switches, and this hardware was distributed to every network operator perfectly fairly based on its contribution to the global maximization of available network capacity, then the delivered capacity to the end user could increase by something like 4.5 orders of magnitude with no substantial change in topology or subscriber or provider costs afterwards using the existing fiber, with a few more orders of magnitude possible with a fatter tree before the backbone costs explode. With DWDM you can carry 100+ channels of 100Gbps over a single fiber today, with commodity, off the shelf components. Most fiber in the ground today is probably still lit with a single wave of 10G, if it's not just dark. This distribution model is not even remotely a technical necessity, it's an arbitrary local minima reached largely by exploitative market distortions and adversarial economics.