AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by q3k on Monday October 21, 2019 @03:39PM (#21316363)

GCP is pretty good though. Cold-potato, very fat backbone, and very good presence at a ton of PoPs. When using GCP you basically have the same global, high-bandwidth direct connectivity presence that Google uses for its products, and that is very difficult to match by traditional T1 ISPs.

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by heleninboodler on Monday October 21, 2019 @03:56PM (#21316556)

Ok, help me out: "cold-potato"? :D

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by lokar on Monday October 21, 2019 @04:02PM (#21316620)

Vs "hot potato"

Hold onto the packet for as long as you can vs hand it off to your peer as quickly as possible.

Most networks do "hot", Google does "cold" since their network is almost always better than that of the peer.

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by Jarwain on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @03:24AM (#21321093)

The origin of which, for those who aren't familiar, is a game called "hot potato" where you try to pass a ball around as quickly as possible as if it was a hot potato

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by Havoc on Monday October 21, 2019 @05:29PM (#21317626)

Weird terminology. Thanks for explaining though

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by techsupporter on Monday October 21, 2019 @04:01PM (#21316610)

It is the inverse of “hot potato” routing where the network tries to get rid of a packet as soon as possible (that is, drop a hot potato). Cold potato means the network keeps the packet on-network as long as it can.

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by codexon on Monday October 21, 2019 @05:45PM (#21317805)

Cold potato is not necessarily better, actually its often times worse than hot potato and usually used to lower costs so you don't have to pay other people for transit.

For example, a cold potato network may have a link from Dallas to Chicago to New York, while a hot potato network could have a direct link from Dallas to New York.

Cogent uses cold potato and is frequently worse than other transit providers.

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by gcommer on Monday October 21, 2019 @06:02PM (#21317958)

Google's cold potato is very good though.

(Also, they offer the option to use hot potato and pay them less: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/docs/overview )

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by achiang on Monday October 21, 2019 @11:09PM (#21320039)

Thanks, you made my day.

I'm a Google network SRE, but perhaps I'll get new business cards saying "cold potato engineer".

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by Dylan16807 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @01:29AM (#21331379)

So it's hard to value the premium for google cold potato specifically, if it outclasses everything else.

But their hot potato still costs $65+ per TB at medium volumes and $45+ per TB at high volumes. That is still extremely high compared to normal peering costs.

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by tyingq on Monday October 21, 2019 @04:59PM (#21317284)

It does have advantages, but it's not always worth the difference of "several cents per GB" versus "fractions of a cent per GB".

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by ikiris on Monday October 21, 2019 @05:06PM (#21317361)

Walmart is generally cheaper than a steak restaurant. YMMV, and they both have their uses. Its worth going to both.

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Re:AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data by tyingq on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:06PM (#21318562)

That's a very odd analogy, and overstating the difference.

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