A lot of datacenter networks are run by absolute clowns. Not Amazon's
AWS keeps customer costs down in part through networking advances
Last month, the reporter sat in a networking lab with AWS VP of Global Network Engineering, Matt Rehder. The reporter jokingly mentioned cage nuts, but Rehder's response was a blank stare. This was because the joke referenced hardware assembly practices no longer used in AWS datacenters. The reporter toured the lab and learned about AWS's flat, single-tier network wired in a random pattern, leading to a more resilient and cost-effective network.
This new approach can be up to 40% more energy efficient and is the default for most new datacenter builds. The cost savings are real and have gone towards lower operational costs, not passed on to customers. The reporter asked if it was fair to say AWS kept the margin improvement, and AWS confirmed they kept the margin improvement.
AWS cloud economics show that they have not raised prices on existing SKUs, and customers can spin up the same instance with 64GB of RAM that they could in 2020 at the same price today, without increasing the price to keep up with inflation. Despite a 9% price increase from Graviton4 to Graviton5, customers are not required to upgrade.
The reporter also learned about AWS's free interconnect service, which charges nothing per GB for data movement between providers, reducing the AWS-side cost of sending traffic to GCP, Oracle, and Azure. This is a significant change from previous rate-based network charges.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
