Do you have some kind of an accessibility tool for this? Maybe a whole screen filter that changes colors in a specific way so you can distinguish them?
Color-blind man here. While I think it’s important to consider color blindness when choosing colors, it’s not actually 8% of men who would have trouble distinguishing the two colors. That number is somewhat lower. Perception of color varies even across colorblind people so just because someone says it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for someone else, and vice versa.
Random 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.
I read this yeaaaars ago. I'm about to re-read this, but before I do, I think this was the article that installed a little goblin in my brain that screams "TTS" in instances like this. I will edit this if the article confirms/denies this goblin.
Obviously the biggest contribution to latency is distance. But there's also some close-ish regions with poor latency because there's not fiber running directly between them (for example, over the poles)
Are there an examples of regions which dramatically violate the triangle equality? (That is, where the A--C latency is much worse than the best A--B + B--C latencies)?
Just as a curiosity, could you use that idea to "infer" which data-centers are most likely directly connected by fiber, and show only the likely fiber connections?
> Are there an examples of regions which dramatically violate the triangle equality? (That is, where the A--C latency is much worse than the best A--B + B--C latencies)?
I don't think this would happen at a significant scale, due to how routing works. If taking the "detour" through B is how the ICMP packets get there cheapest, that's the path they will go.
If anything, we could look at where A–C is nearly equal to A–B + B–C and find where such a thing has happened. I suppose it could happen for reasons other than lack of fiber: financially better peering agreements, etc?
Going back decades when a billion US was real money the original NSA (No Such Agency) that essentially no one had ever heard of, including most of the US houses and much of the defence committees that had clearance but not that clearance, had a 4 Billion+ budget for "off-book" satellites.
Black cables are a damn sight cheaper than black satellites.
Interesting. 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?
These aren't even data centers, but aggregates. They're regions, composed of many different bits of networking and compute in various levels of abstraction - dc, edge installation, whatever.
Within these regions there's a lot of variation from zone to zone, so the methodology matters.
AWS provides latency numbers between regions, AZ's and within an AZ in network manager. Useful to have as a latency baseline and to see if they have any issue.
> AWS provides latency numbers between regions, AZ's and within an AZ in network manager.
AWS also provides dashboards that shows what regions/services are down, and history tells us those are not to be trusted for precisely the same reasons.
Afaik it also requires someone to manually set it to be down on that page. Pretty sure that nobody is entering latency numbers manually every second, but maybe they have a team for that.
The data is really useful, and the globe is visually impressive, but it feels like it'd be more practically useful to have a flat world map that shows all the data centers at once and makes it easier to read the lines without them getting excessively close to each other.
How 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 to route across England to get to a cable to the content).
> 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.
Its a bit sad, we have one of the Swedish, actual physical buildings for AWS in my town. But of course the traffic does not exit here, but is instead aggregated between the different sites spread around cities regionally. So no sub-ms latencies for me towards that center. I think the traffic basically went a couple hundred kms before turning back here.
I presume your town is too small for it since you called it a town, but AWS also does these things called "wavelength zones" which are as close as possible to certain cellular networks (designed to ride th 5G M2M hype train - self-driving vehicles, etc). Not sure if they do something similar for fixed networks.
Of course, it doesn't actually matter since friends don't let friends use AWS.
the "globe" visualization is good ... but we cna only see half the world at a time ... can we have an option of a flat projection as well ... so I can see all latencies for a region at a glance?
ap-south-2 (Asia Pacific - Hyderabad,India) opened in Nov 2022 seems to be missing from the list?
This jives with measurements I've done before. I ended up running a ping setup for a few months from every region to every other region to get these timings. I was using it to calculate what our GQL latencies would look like if the backing servers were in another region or in the same region as a way to start regionalization work. Sadly we had to depend on those latencies so much that it was deemed a non-starter of an approach. Even us-west-2 (home) to us-east-2 took us from p99 300ms to p99 2.4 seconds. That sweet sweet latency reduction.
I believe it's a combination of a lack of customers and lack of infrastructure. It's a big continent to cover with the necessary fibre capacity, and the market is much smaller for nearby services.
Also what you don't see in things like this, or even a list of datacenter locations, is the relative sizes of the datacenters. After US east/west coasts and Europe, datacenter capacity rapidly tails off. Parts of Asia have plenty but not on the same scale I believe (although I don't know about the Chinese market). The difference in size can be quite a few orders of magnitude between different regions.
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.
Is 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?
newbie here, you basically loaded d3.js to draw that globe. Is there a tutorial you followed to create those lines dynamically on the globe? Mind sharing some info on how you made this?
> Close to the network centrality of the of the internet
Most of the Internet is fractured even though technically publically routable.
E.g., for someone living in China the US isn't anywhere near "network centrality".
If an internet centrality exists, it is somewhere in France or the Netherlands - usually cross-continent traffic goes through there, they have dedicated interchanges for that.
Although in my experience all the traffic from East Asia and Oceania (Australia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc) to Europe goes through the US. So network-wise, the US is more central.
Agreed the network is much denser in Europe than the USA. This is obvious if you've really tried looking for network infrastructure services. The USA is just where a lot more high-level services are, like social media, due to the peculiarities of capitalism. There's no shortage of infrastructure there either, of course.
Data caps are apparently illegal here. This is good for the quality of infrastructure.
And if you have customers somewhere else you want to be in that place, or close to it network-wise.
I have red-green color blindness, which makes it hard/impossible for me to distinguish between the <100ms and >200ms lines.
This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!
There are some chrome extensions for colorblind. It might be helpful to you. Please check it out.
Do you have some kind of an accessibility tool for this? Maybe a whole screen filter that changes colors in a specific way so you can distinguish them?
Color-blind man here. While I think it’s important to consider color blindness when choosing colors, it’s not actually 8% of men who would have trouble distinguishing the two colors. That number is somewhat lower. Perception of color varies even across colorblind people so just because someone says it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for someone else, and vice versa.
This is such an easy thing to overlook for those of us that don’t. Red/green tends to be a default selection, perhaps because of traffic lights?
I started putting myself in the shoes of a family member who is in the 8% and now i spend more time trying to pick better color schemes
I don’t see any lines at all. Just blue dots repeating the data centers. Very confusing.
You have to click one of the data centres
Tap a blue dot.
Click dots.
Random 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)
I read this yeaaaars ago. I'm about to re-read this, but before I do, I think this was the article that installed a little goblin in my brain that screams "TTS" in instances like this. I will edit this if the article confirms/denies this goblin.
EDIT: mostly, probably, sort of.
Funny story. He must thank the department of statistics for the quick turn around.
There's a surprising amount of real-world modelling that can be done to satisfactory precision with just multiplication and addition.
I think this is because of medium velocity of light
"Through LabVIEW the speed of light in the optical fiber is calculated to be ~ 2.054 x 108 m/s corresponding to a refractive index of n ≈ 1.4606 which is a typical value" https://web.phys.ksu.edu/posters/2009/juma-Adv-Lab-S09.pdf
This page is such a well executed interactive map. Really enjoyed it
Is the math-planation of your random fact basically
(thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Hikikomori for correcting the lightspeed in fibre medium from 3e5 to 2e5 !)
- lightspeed is 2e5 km/s ~ 2e2 km/ms, so/
- length (km) / 200 (km)/ms ~ K length (km) / 200 (km)/ms, so
- latency (ms) ~ K' length (km)
Where K is approximately 1.3 (K' is 1/155) and factors in things like:
- non straight line distance
- networking overhead / switching
- both ways / measurement error
Basically?
Speed of light in a medium like fiber is about 200 000km/s.
Oh shit! Thanks. Good point. That actually makes it more plausible, as K is smaller.
It is possible I was measuring latency in a single direction, rather than round-trip-time. My memory is a little hazy now.
Obviously the biggest contribution to latency is distance. But there's also some close-ish regions with poor latency because there's not fiber running directly between them (for example, over the poles)
Are there an examples of regions which dramatically violate the triangle equality? (That is, where the A--C latency is much worse than the best A--B + B--C latencies)?
Just as a curiosity, could you use that idea to "infer" which data-centers are most likely directly connected by fiber, and show only the likely fiber connections?
> Are there an examples of regions which dramatically violate the triangle equality? (That is, where the A--C latency is much worse than the best A--B + B--C latencies)?
I don't think this would happen at a significant scale, due to how routing works. If taking the "detour" through B is how the ICMP packets get there cheapest, that's the path they will go.
If anything, we could look at where A–C is nearly equal to A–B + B–C and find where such a thing has happened. I suppose it could happen for reasons other than lack of fiber: financially better peering agreements, etc?
You can just look at the map of fiber optic cables around the world: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
It's highly unlikely there are any non-disclosed undersea ones since they cost rather a lot to lay down.
> It's highly unlikely there are any ..
Going back decades when a billion US was real money the original NSA (No Such Agency) that essentially no one had ever heard of, including most of the US houses and much of the defence committees that had clearance but not that clearance, had a 4 Billion+ budget for "off-book" satellites.
Black cables are a damn sight cheaper than black satellites.
Interesting. 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?
These aren't even data centers, but aggregates. They're regions, composed of many different bits of networking and compute in various levels of abstraction - dc, edge installation, whatever.
Within these regions there's a lot of variation from zone to zone, so the methodology matters.
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 :)
Nitpick detail: us-east-1 (and all other availability zones) are also not a single datacenter by definition. The can also spend several
AWS provides latency numbers between regions, AZ's and within an AZ in network manager. Useful to have as a latency baseline and to see if they have any issue.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/network-manager/latest/infrastru...
> AWS provides latency numbers between regions, AZ's and within an AZ in network manager.
AWS also provides dashboards that shows what regions/services are down, and history tells us those are not to be trusted for precisely the same reasons.
Afaik it also requires someone to manually set it to be down on that page. Pretty sure that nobody is entering latency numbers manually every second, but maybe they have a team for that.
The data is really useful, and the globe is visually impressive, but it feels like it'd be more practically useful to have a flat world map that shows all the data centers at once and makes it easier to read the lines without them getting excessively close to each other.
This was popular in ham radio, iirc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti...
A 2D world may not give you the perception of how far some of these locations really are. I think an option to switch between the two would be better.
https://www.greatcirclemap.com has this.
How 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 to route across England to get to a cable to the content).
There are good few DCs missing on that atlas
> 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.
Yeah the new(ish) Melbourne region is missing too
Its a bit sad, we have one of the Swedish, actual physical buildings for AWS in my town. But of course the traffic does not exit here, but is instead aggregated between the different sites spread around cities regionally. So no sub-ms latencies for me towards that center. I think the traffic basically went a couple hundred kms before turning back here.
Does your ISP peer directly with Aws?
I presume your town is too small for it since you called it a town, but AWS also does these things called "wavelength zones" which are as close as possible to certain cellular networks (designed to ride th 5G M2M hype train - self-driving vehicles, etc). Not sure if they do something similar for fixed networks.
Of course, it doesn't actually matter since friends don't let friends use AWS.
Hah, CloudPing is awesome. I just wrote a TUI in Rust for exactly the same thing: https://github.com/obviyus/pong
I found myself going to CloudPing often enough to make a CLI for it
interesting
the "globe" visualization is good ... but we cna only see half the world at a time ... can we have an option of a flat projection as well ... so I can see all latencies for a region at a glance?
ap-south-2 (Asia Pacific - Hyderabad,India) opened in Nov 2022 seems to be missing from the list?
I was just using this the other day: https://aws-latency-test.com/
This jives with measurements I've done before. I ended up running a ping setup for a few months from every region to every other region to get these timings. I was using it to calculate what our GQL latencies would look like if the backing servers were in another region or in the same region as a way to start regionalization work. Sadly we had to depend on those latencies so much that it was deemed a non-starter of an approach. Even us-west-2 (home) to us-east-2 took us from p99 300ms to p99 2.4 seconds. That sweet sweet latency reduction.
https://www.devex.com/people/como-llamar-a-american-airlines...
Just curious, why is there no us central or us texas region? It could maybe be useful.
and why are there hardly any in South America and Africa?
Maybe a question with an obvious answer, but why are there not yet more data centers in Africa?
I believe it's a combination of a lack of customers and lack of infrastructure. It's a big continent to cover with the necessary fibre capacity, and the market is much smaller for nearby services.
Also what you don't see in things like this, or even a list of datacenter locations, is the relative sizes of the datacenters. After US east/west coasts and Europe, datacenter capacity rapidly tails off. Parts of Asia have plenty but not on the same scale I believe (although I don't know about the Chinese market). The difference in size can be quite a few orders of magnitude between different regions.
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.
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.
All of the datacenters are colour-coded as blue, which is not on the legend. What does this mean?
Since all of them are same color its not really color coding and hence not on the legend, its just OPs choice for color of points
No lines were working for me, so the only feature was the blue colour of the dots, hence thinking they must be colour coded in line with the legend.
click on one
Ah, this was what I tried first, and it didn't do anything, but now it does seem to be doing something. That makes sense now, thanks.
Same... didn't work until I moved the globe a bit. I thought the site was broken, or getting the HN hug of death.
Is 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?
Basically yes, as distance is the most important factor when it comes to latency.
This is really cool, wish there were something like it for Azure as well.
Is there something similar for GCP?
Be the change you want to see. How much does it cost to set up a VM in every availability zone for an hour?
newbie here, you basically loaded d3.js to draw that globe. Is there a tutorial you followed to create those lines dynamically on the globe? Mind sharing some info on how you made this?
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.
> Close to the network centrality of the of the internet
Most of the Internet is fractured even though technically publically routable. E.g., for someone living in China the US isn't anywhere near "network centrality".
If an internet centrality exists, it is somewhere in France or the Netherlands - usually cross-continent traffic goes through there, they have dedicated interchanges for that.
Although in my experience all the traffic from East Asia and Oceania (Australia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc) to Europe goes through the US. So network-wise, the US is more central.
Agreed the network is much denser in Europe than the USA. This is obvious if you've really tried looking for network infrastructure services. The USA is just where a lot more high-level services are, like social media, due to the peculiarities of capitalism. There's no shortage of infrastructure there either, of course.
Data caps are apparently illegal here. This is good for the quality of infrastructure.
And if you have customers somewhere else you want to be in that place, or close to it network-wise.
really cool tool, thanks for building this.