[blakesterz]

Interesting read. Can someone explain this point to me? "Software-defined networking means that google.com appears to be one hop away" One hop from...? Everywhere? Each server? How does that help? I understand 'traceroute' but not where that single hop to Google comes in and why that's great.

[obulpathi]

Yep. That's right.Google has built their custom networking. It's like when a machine A sends packet to machine B, the packet is handed over to Google SDN (Software-defined Network), which carries to over their private network and then injects the packet into machine B. Googles network is an order of magnitude faster compared to AWS.

[StreamBright]

You mean if AWS has 50ms data center latency than GCP has 5ms?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

[obulpathi]

Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster.

Reference: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-comp...

[otterley]

What did you use to copy the file? If you used scp, your results are invalid and you must re-run the test again with a different protocol: you can't take advantage of large TCP window sizes with it because ssh uses a small, fixed send/receive buffer size. scp will penalize the performance of large transfers over high-latency links, even if the bandwidth between them is high.

[pbbakkum]

Sure - this isn't really a dimension of comparison, just something that I found interesting / surprising. It seems like SDN is probably the future, and this is an illustration of how its different.

[StreamBright]

He probably "measured" it within GCP. :)