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Posted by orliesaurus 10/24/2024

AWS data center latencies, visualized(benjdd.com)
529 points | 209 commentspage 4
tmalsburg2 10/24/2024|
Very roughly 1/3 of the speed of light. One third is lost to the physical medium it seems. What accounts of the remaining third and how much could be plausibly shaved off of it?
jedberg 10/24/2024||
Undersea cable routing. For example there are no undersea cables from Ireland to the European continent. All that traffic has to land in England first and go through a few routers to get sent on its way.

South America and Africa are even worse in that regard. Very few if any direct links.

Aeolun 10/24/2024||
I think the lines the data goes through are unfortunately not quite as straight as they appear in this visualization. Nor is it light all the way.
vivzkestrel 10/24/2024||
newbie here, you basically loaded d3.js to draw that globe. Is there a tutorial you followed to create those lines dynamically on the globe? Mind sharing some info on how you made this?
billybet 10/24/2024||
Is there any oss software which replicates that ping grid/table where you can have multiple sensors feeding information back to get an overview of latency on your own network?
paulkrush 10/24/2024||
It's cool you can look at 1/2 of the earth and see only one data center and one link. ap-southeast-2 and it's only link is too far away to show.
immibis 10/24/2024|
It shows links to wherever you selected. Select this DC to see the latency between it and everywhere else.
whalesalad 10/24/2024||
Would be cool if there was a mode that showed YOUR latency to all the datacenters. That is what I assumed this would do initially.
gynther 10/24/2024||
There is an official tool to do that https://aws-latency-test.com/
remram 10/24/2024||
This is cool, but per footer "This is not an official AWS project"
elAhmo 10/24/2024||
Great visualisation and way of presenting info!
bddicken 10/24/2024|
Author here - Thank you for the compliment.
SergeAx 10/30/2024||
So, there's no good fallback for `sa-east-1`...
alex_young 10/24/2024||
Us-east-1 is hard to beat.

Close to the network centrality of the of the internet, low latency to both the west coast and Europe.

otabdeveloper4 10/24/2024||
> Close to the network centrality of the of the internet

Most of the Internet is fractured even though technically publically routable. E.g., for someone living in China the US isn't anywhere near "network centrality".

If an internet centrality exists, it is somewhere in France or the Netherlands - usually cross-continent traffic goes through there, they have dedicated interchanges for that.

utdemir 10/24/2024|||
I did some research about this a while back: https://utdemir.com/posts/choosing-cloud-regions.html#:~:tex...

You are right, the best region that optimises median latency against all internet users over the world is `us-west-3`, which is Paris - I believe. Likely because it has much better latency towards Asia where the majority of internet users are.

I also investigated which two regions to choose for a multi-region setup, which ends up being London and Japan.

kalleboo 10/24/2024||||
Although in my experience all the traffic from East Asia and Oceania (Australia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc) to Europe goes through the US. So network-wise, the US is more central.
immibis 10/24/2024|||
Agreed the network is much denser in Europe than the USA. This is obvious if you've really tried looking for network infrastructure services. The USA is just where a lot more high-level services are, like social media, due to the peculiarities of capitalism. There's no shortage of infrastructure there either, of course.

Data caps are apparently illegal here. This is good for the quality of infrastructure.

And if you have customers somewhere else you want to be in that place, or close to it network-wise.

poincaredisk 10/24/2024||
My knee jerk reaction was to comment that this is an America-centric thinking (I live in eastern Europe, us-east is not that great), but... After consulting the map, it really looks better than the other options (of course assuming you care mostly about Europe, Americas, and don't want to piss off Asia too much)
DonnyV 10/24/2024|
It would be great to have all major providers on here. With a history chart to compare all providers.
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