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AWS data center latencies, visualized

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Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#151

Post by Thaxll »

curtisf wrote: post #65

Obviously the biggest contribution to latency is distance. But there's also some close-ish regions with poor latency because there's not fiber running directly between them (for example, over the poles) Are there an examples of regions which dramatically violate the triangle equality? (That is, where the A--C latency is much worse than the best A--B + B--C latencies)? Just as a curiosity, could you use that idea to "…

There are some regions that have notoriously bad networking with higher packet loss, for example South America and South Asia are pretty bad overall.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#152

Post by solarkennedy »

cedws wrote: post #82

Technically speaking those aren’t datacenters, they’re regions. AWS regions can have multiple AZs, and each AZ can have multiple datacenters spread around a city, each with different latency characteristics. This is completely opaque to customers, you don’t really get to choose which one you’re in. There are ways to gain info about it though. This is way outdated now but gives a rough idea: https://wikileaks.org/amaz…

I did a graphviz visualization of cross-az latency for all azs here https://xkyle.com/Measuring-AWS-Region-and-AZ-Latency/ (gosh, 4 years old now)

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#153

Post by floodle »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

The data is really useful, and the globe is visually impressive, but it feels like it'd be more practically useful to have a flat world map that shows all the data centers at once and makes it easier to read the lines without them getting excessively close to each other.

Agreed! It looks cool, but it's not the best visualisation to actually read the data.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#154

Post by some_random »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #95
alex_suzuki wrote: post #47

I have red-green color blindness, which makes it hard/impossible for me to distinguish between the 200ms lines. This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!

It's sad that this is the top comment for the post. Many people have stopped posting their crappy work online due to harsh comments like yours. There's no easy reply to your comment. Maybe we should be less critical specially with "Make it fit for my workflow" type comment, and more so if it is built by some random guy in their free time, and not say a project which is asking money.

I totally understand being frustrated about people demanding workflow changes or huge accessibility features, but this is literally just a color swap that can be done with a touch of CSS it's really not a big deal.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#155

Post by bane »

Cool visualization and concept. I do wish the colors were on a ramp instead of bucketed. The reason is that it makes 100ms look much worse than 99ms, but equal to 200ms. If you click on us-east-1, for example, the latency to the data centers in Western Europe look quite different with eu-central-1 and eu-south-1 looking completely different even though the latency is only around 9ms difference and eu-north-1 and ap-south-1 look the same even though there's about a 88ms difference!

There's some comments here also wondering about the best possible latency for speed of light vs what these measurements are. The problem with this is that c isn't the propagation velocity of information through fiber, it's some velocity well under c and depends on a number of different factors, many of which are unknowable, such as repeater latency and so on. In practice, the best theoretical value is no higher than 70% of c just measuring the velocity of light in a medium as c measures light in a vacuum.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#156

Post by Drunkfoowl »

CountVonGuetzli wrote: post #109

It would be really cool if it didn't just show the ping, but how much worse it is compared to the theoretical optimum (speed of light in fiber optic medium, which I believe is about 30% slower than c). I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible…

[dead]

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#157

Post by bddicken »

CountVonGuetzli wrote: post #109

It would be really cool if it didn't just show the ping, but how much worse it is compared to the theoretical optimum (speed of light in fiber optic medium, which I believe is about 30% slower than c). I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible…

Author here - Interesting. Someone on X also gave this idea to me. Any good resources for how to accurately compute this?

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#158

Post by bloopernova »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #86
blauditore wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a quick workaround, you can set a CSS filter on the whole page: Either use dev tools to put a rule `filter: hue-rotate(60deg);` on the `body` element, or simply run `javascript:void(document.body.style.filter='hue-rotate(60deg)')` from the url bar.

Nice hack, thank you! :-)

You can also use ublock origin, it has a section for your own filters:

https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#159

Post by bddicken »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #47

I have red-green color blindness, which makes it hard/impossible for me to distinguish between the 200ms lines. This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!

Author here - Thanks for the suggestion Alex. From your perspective, what are some of the best ways you've seen people solve for this in the past? If you have links, please share.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#160

Post by kqr »

dmurray wrote: post #121
sandworm101 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-bandwidth/low-latency people tend to also demand high reliability and consistency. A low-orbit satellite network might be fast but, because sats move to quickly, cannot be consistent in that speed. Sats also won't ever connect data centers other than perhaps for administrative stuff. The bandwidth/reliability/growth potential just isn't there compared to bundles of traditional fiber.

> Low-bandwidth/low-latency people tend to also demand high reliability and consistency. For trading applications, people will absolutely pay for a service that is hard down 75% of the time and has 50% packet loss the rest, but saves a millisecond over the fastest reliable line. Because otherwise someone else will be faster than you when the service is working. They can get reliability and consistency with a redundan…

Can you provide a source to this statement? The redundancy needed to transmit at desirable reliability with 50 % packet loss would, I imagine, very quickly eat into any millisecond gains -- even with theoretically optimal coding.

Someone more familiar with Shannon than I could probably quickly back-of-the-napkin this.

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