AWS

Inter-AZ cloud network performance

Archana Kesavan of ThousandEyes speaking at NANOG75 reports that network traffic between AZs within a single region is generally “reliable and consistent,” and that tested cloud providers offer a “robust regional backbone for [suitable for] redundant, multi-AZ architectures.”

ThousandEyes ran tests at ten minute intervals over 30 days, testing bidirectional loss, latency, and jitter. Kesavan reported the average inter-AZ latency for each tested cloud:

AWS Azure GCP
.82ms 1.05ms 0.79ms

Within the four tested regions in AWS, they found:

Region Latency
us-east-1 0.92ms
ap-south-1 0.72ms
eu-west-2 0.61ms
sa-east-1 1.13ms

Kesavan’s slides and video are online.

Parts of a network you should know about

If you’re running infrastructure and applications on AWS then you will encounter all of these things. They’re not the only parts of a network setup but they are, in my experience, the most important ones.

The start of Graham Lyons’ introduction to networking on AWS, which (though the terms may change) is a pretty good primer for networking in any cloud environment. Though cloud infrastructure providers have to deal with things at a different later, Graham’s post covers the basics—VPCs, subnets, availability zones, routing tables, gateways, and security groups—that customers need to manage when assembling their applications.

AWS regions, AZs, and VPCs, NICs, IPs, and performance

Jump to section: Availability zones and regions VPCs Elastic IPs and Elastic Network Interfaces Network performance Resources by scope Connectivity by scope Availability zones and regions AWS’ primary cloud is available in 15 regions, each with two to six availability zones, not including separately operated regions (with independent identity) for GovCloud and China. » about 4600 words

AWS' Andy Troutman on component reusability

What we do first is we build very simple foundational building block services … we will build the simplest possible service that you could think of.

The next thing we do is we encourage an open marketplace within Amazon so individual teams can use, optimize, and extend these basic services.

We use our individual [teams] as a test lab to experiment on better ways to do things, and when we find something that seems to be working, we look for ways to [grow it and use it more] broadly.

Then, on the value of open repos:

We want this ecosystem of learning from each other because we are all leveraging each other’s web services. We have these hardened contracts, it’s incredibly high leverage to be able to go and see how someone else used a web service quickly, and rip a piece of their code—steal it—and make use of it for your own purposes.

Andy’s slides are at Slideshare.

Drivers and “standards”

A contact at Intel spoke rather openly that AWS was consuming about 50% of all Intel CPUs. Ignoring what this means for Intel’s business prospects, consider that it means that AWS is effectively the dominant server ~~manufacturer~~designer. And, now that they’re building their own components, they’re the biggest developer of drivers for server hardware. » about 400 words

Hardware virtualization has moved to hardware

One of my takeaways from AWS’ bare metal announcements at re:Invent this week is that the compute, storage, and network aspects of hardware virtualization are now optimized and accelerated in hardware. AWS has moved beyond the limitations that constrained VM performance, and the work they’ve done applies both to their bare metal hardware and their latest VM instance types.

» about 900 words

Amazon’s Content Delivery Network Launches In Beta

Amazon calls it CloudFront, and it costs $0.17 – $0.22 per GB at the lowest usage tiers. It seems that you simply put your files in an S3 container, make an API call to share them, then let your users enjoy the lower-latency, higher performance service.

Their domestic locations include sites in Virginia, Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey, Washington, and Missouri. Internationally, they’ve got Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo covered.

Amazon To Offer Content Delivery Services

Via an email from the Amazon Web Services group today: …we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS — a content delivery service. This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers […] » about 400 words

APIs Are Big Business

ProgrammableWeb pointed out an InformationWeek story that claimed 28% of Amazon’s sales in early 2005 were attributable to Amazon affiliates. And C|net claims Amazon now has 180,000 AWS developers (up from the 140,000 Amazon was claiming about a year ago).

(Note: not every Amazon affiliate/associate is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer, but Amazon hasn’t shared more specific numbers.)

These slides, from Amazon’s AWS developer relations team explain a lot about what AWS is.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service

Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories. I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to […] » about 200 words

Standards Cage Match

I prefaced my point about how the standards we choose in libraries isolate us from the larger stream of progress driving development outside libraries with the note that I was sure to get hanged for it. It’s true. I commented that there were over 140,00 registered Amazon API developers and 365 public OpenSearch targets (hey […] » about 1000 words