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I wonder what would be the implications of AWS egress traffic increasing significantly (like order of magnitude). It is easy to rant about costs when you do not

by zokier 3y ago

I wonder what would be the implications of AWS egress traffic increasing significantly (like order of magnitude). It is easy to rant about costs when you do not need to consider the consequences. Obviously AWS would need to build up their own network capacity, that's the easy part. More importantly they would need build up interchange infra too. This is the point I struggle to even imagine what the scale is like. Is it just plopping in couple of new 100G ports, or would that be just a drop in the ocean and in reality its more like couple of racks of network gear. Then there is the question how the ISPs/peers AWS is connected to are able to handle the traffic; AWS is not able to just unilaterally increase their egress capacity, the traffic needs to go somewhere. Besides technical questions, such increase might also cause renegotiations for peering agreements especially if the traffic balance shifts dramatically. And so on. This got me also thinking, would operating some sort of spot market for traffic make sense to AWS? I imagine for them the main expence is maintaining capacity and that to me implies that optimizing off-peak use could be beneficial.

wmf 3y ago
If AWS has massive diseconomies of scale that calls into question the entire model of public cloud.
- jayveeone 3y ago
  What public cloud?
toast0 3y ago
> This got me also thinking, would operating some sort of spot market for traffic make sense to AWS? Probably not, except in exceptional cases. I don't know how AWS manages their networks, but chances are they have a lot of spare capacity most of the time. And likely some major customers with location flexibility. When I was a #1 customer of a different cloud, they had a fiber cut between one of their buildings and their IX PoP, and lost a sizable amount of capacity until the fiber was repaired. They asked us to move a ton of traffic, and we asked 'why us?' and the answer was basically if we moved that much traffic, none of their other customers needed to move anything, and we had the ability to move traffic quickly (and we had our lower bandwidth core service in the affected buildings that really couldn't move). I don't know how much Amazon retail and Amazon prime streaming use, but it could be significant and is almost certainly easy to move.

by zokier 3y ago

wmf 3y ago

If AWS has massive diseconomies of scale that calls into question the entire model of public cloud.

jayveeone 3y ago
What public cloud?

toast0 3y ago

> This got me also thinking, would operating some sort of spot market for traffic make sense to AWS? Probably not, except in exceptional cases. I don't know how AWS manages their networks, but chances are they have a lot of spare capacity most of the time. And likely some major customers with location flexibility. When I was a #1 customer of a different cloud, they had a fiber cut between one of their buildings and their IX PoP, and lost a sizable amount of capacity until the fiber was repaired. They asked us to move a ton of traffic, and we asked 'why us?' and the answer was basically if we moved that much traffic, none of their other customers needed to move anything, and we had the ability to move traffic quickly (and we had our lower bandwidth core service in the affected buildings that really couldn't move). I don't know how much Amazon retail and Amazon prime streaming use, but it could be significant and is almost certainly easy to move.