Your little NAS is not directly connected to hundreds of metro areas around the globe. Even on Google Fiber, which is an excellent network, you only have a few dozen points of exchange, all in America. As a Google Cloud customer your egress traffic will be on Google's network all the way to the very edges of the world, at hundreds of interconnect points and exchanges. Your traffic will be on private networks until it is with a few miles of your end user, in all likelihood. This is a comparison between apples and diamonds.

Except they will charge you the same extortionate egress fees for outbound traffic from a single compute instance ("an apple"), no global content delivery network involved ("a diamond").

It doesn’t matter where your instance is, the point is the traffic will flow on Google’s worldwide private backbone until it gets very close to where it’s going.

You say that like its a service Google is providing, but it’s really just cheaper for them.

Explain that. Google egress is expensive because it is capable. You could operate a product like Zoom from it.

This is similar, with different tradeoffs, to what Riot did for their gaming backbone. They wrote a blog about this but I cant't find it.

Instead of relying on consumer ISP's to route gaming packets for speed, they would instead route them for costs. Taking extra hops and extra latency before reaching the target server.

Riot built an overlay network using their own fiber and negotiated BGP deals with consumer ISP's to get gaming traffic off the ISP's internal network on onto Riot's ASAP so they could route the packets directly to their gaming servers.

this might be it? https://qz.com/790208/how-the-company-behind-league-of-legen...

also, linked from that: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-t...

Thanks. I think those cover details of what I'm talking about but not the blog post I remember.

A key issue discussed was some setting relating to BGP (or similar) that consumer ISPs wouldn't initially implement or wouldnt configure for Riot. Something related to weights or something that affected the cost analysis for routing decisions that prevented packets from wanting to take the Riot path.

edit:

Just fully read that QZ article. I think it does a good job of describing what they did with useful inforgraphics (esp the "Actual Data Route" graphic) for a layman audience. I think many of us here can extrapolate what kind of effort they had to go through to get that done.

> let my friend download it for free

Except you paid the cost for the fiber connection. You also get one more 9 of reliability from their DC.

Your Google Fiber IP is part of a residential network with a completely different service agreement and larger limitations than Google Cloud.

Residential usually has some kind of hard data cap. Like if you transfer >10TB they'll just cut you off. You're also generally barred from running any kind of commercial application.

The data caps are generally only with comcast and other low-quality hall-of-mirrors bargain-bin types of cable ISPs.

For example, AT&T fiber has no bandwidth caps and offers symmetric 1-10 gigabit download and upload service in an ever expanding number of areas throughout the US.

Maybe in the US. Not here in Europe

They figure most people are hosting websites which are only a couple of MB, so they need to charge this much to be able to extract egress money from them.