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.
AWS data center latencies, visualized
21–30 of 223 posts
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#22How did you choose which datacenters to include? For example, eu-south-2 (Spain) is missing. The reason I know is because I worked on a project that required latency to be under 30ms between datacenters, and we had to use eu-west-1 (Ireland) and eu-south-2. Turns out that latency is closer to 42ms, mainly because there are no undersea cables between Ireland and the continent (they only go to England, then they have t…
> How did you choose which datacenters to include? For example, eu-south-2 (Spain) is missing.
At the bottom of the page it says: «Data scraped from CloudPing», with the CloudPing dataset linked through. If you click through to CloudPing, you won't find «eu-south-2» in the dataset.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#23Random fact: I did some planning around this for a client a while ago. While measuring the AWS latencies I found I could get approximate latencies (within 10%) by measuring the rough undersea cable length (km) and dividing by 150.
While not overly surprising, it was very consistent.
Edit: I think it was actually 155
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#24Random fact: I did some planning around this for a client a while ago. While measuring the AWS latencies I found I could get approximate latencies (within 10%) by measuring the rough undersea cable length (km) and dividing by 150. While not overly surprising, it was very consistent. Edit: I think it was actually 155
That reminds me of the story of the 500 mile email (https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#25Is this just fiber distance between each datacenter? The coloring makes it seem significant, but from the distances it kinda just looked like ever < _km (100ms) was green, everything between _km(100ms) and _km(200ms) was orange, and everything over was red.
I'm not sure what you're wondering here. Of course physical distance is going to be a dominating factor, but this is measuring packet transit times. The speed of light over half a great-circle is only 67ms or so, ot maybe 100ms considering velocity factor in fiber, so clearly there's more to it than just distance. We can talk about what those other things are, but we both know they exist, right?
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#26Maybe a question with an obvious answer, but why are there not yet more data centers in Africa?
[deleted]
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#27Maybe a question with an obvious answer, but why are there not yet more data centers in Africa?
This isn’t just an issue for cloud providers. It’s also not easy to find collocation space either.
My best guess is that it is a combination lower demand (vs rest of world), and infrastructure availability (connectivity + power).
I can imagine a bunch of secondary factors too, but this to me sounds like the key broad reasons.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#28Interesting. If you click on one of the blue circles representing a data center, it shows latencies to the other data centers. This took me a second to figure out — maybe consider adding a note along the lines of “click to select a data center” on the site?
Author here. This is great feedback, thanks.
Idea: select a data center by default (i.e. us-east-1) to make it more clear.
Bonus: select the nearest data center based on the user’s IP :)
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#29Is this just fiber distance between each datacenter? The coloring makes it seem significant, but from the distances it kinda just looked like ever < _km (100ms) was green, everything between _km(100ms) and _km(200ms) was orange, and everything over was red.
Basically yes, as distance is the most important factor when it comes to latency.
Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized
#30Maybe a question with an obvious answer, but why are there not yet more data centers in Africa?
Smaller market, less reliable power grids, more challenging heat management, less political stability in many african countries. Also, given their pricing, big cloud vendors AWS are a luxury many local businesses would probably not even consider.