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.
AWS data center latencies, visualized
171–180 of 223 posts
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#172Would be cool if there was a mode that showed YOUR latency to all the datacenters. That is what I assumed this would do initially.
There is an official tool to do that https://aws-latency-test.com/
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#173Would be cool if there was a mode that showed YOUR latency to all the datacenters. That is what I assumed this would do initially.
[deleted]
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#174It 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?
The theoretical best latency would be something like speed_of_light_in_fiber/great_circle_distance_between_regions, both of which are pretty easy to find. The first is a constant you can look up, and the second you can compute from coordinates of each region pair.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. This is great feedback, thanks.
I appreciate the effort to collect the data, but I think the rotating globe is an idea that looks cool, but makes the visualization harder to use. If I click on us-east-1, there's a 229ms line to...somewhere that I can't see. Meanwhile, I can't see the latency between us-east-1 and us-east-2. Perhaps if you selected a datacenter, and it switched to a 2-d projection with that datacenter at the center of the map, it wo…
Author here - You can see the raw data as a table here: https://www.cloudping.co. Sometimes visualizations like this are a careful act of balancing practicality with cool-factor.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#176It 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…
You would have to map out the cables to do that. Light in fiber optic cable travels roughly 70% of the speed of light ~210,000 km/s Earth's circumferences is ~40,000 kilometers. Direct route from the other side of Earth to another would be roughly 100 milliseconds, round trip 200 ms.
Since light travels at 100% the speed of light in a vacuum (by definition), I have wondered if latency over far distances could be improved by sending the data through a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit instead. Though I suspect the set of tradeoffs here (much lower throughput, much higher cost, more jitter in the latency due to satellites constantly moving around relative to the terrestrial surface) probably wouldn't make this worth it for a slight decrease in latency for any use case.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#177Pedantic but important: These are latencies between regions not data centers.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#178Note that latencies between regions are subject to change: individual links can go down or become overloaded, resulting in traffic needing to take alternate (longer) paths. Unless you have a contract specifying a specific latency, you should still be prepared for things to slow down on occasion.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Traders wouldn't use redundancy etc. Whenever a packet with info arrives, they would trade on that info (eg. "$MSFT stock is about to go down, so buy before it drops!"). If there is packet loss, then some info is lost, and therefore some profitable trading opportunities are missed. But thats okay.
There are thousands of such opportunities each second - they can come from consumer 'order flow' - ie. information that someone would like to buy a stock tells you the price will slightly rise, so go buy ahead of them and sell after them in some remote location.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#180I 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.
[deleted]