AWS doesn't even let you do BGP. If you want to use them for a CDN, you're monopolized into their network and their blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.
They might be using AWS for the canonical store of data, but the sanity of using "the cloud" goes out the window the second you need to ship a lot of traffic to the public internet.
While I don't know what pricing AWS has for high bandwidth customers since it's not public, I do know that the public prices are really high.
The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB above 350 TB.
With colocation or renting dedicated servers and IP-transit you can get way lower prices. A dedicated 1 Gbps is about 300 USD/month with my provider, and the prices drops hard for dedicated 10, 40 and 100 Gbps uplinks.
Never used OVH myself, but they are providing 2 Gbps at £340/month for their highest quality bandwidth, and £64/month for bandwidth they think would be good for downloads.
I think using cloud providers for somewhat high bandwidth services are basically throwing money out the window. Until prices really drops(if they ever will) I'll continue thinking that clouds are for temporary workloads or prototyping with the ability to easily scale at a high cost.
Below $10k/mo bandwidth plays are irrelevant - the cost of the support infrastructure is just too high.
At $10k/mo what you do is plop a rack in one of the well connected buildings in NYC, VA, SF, SJC, CHI and get either flat rate 10Gs or 1G commits over 10Gs. You should be paying between 0.55 and 0.75 per Mbit/sec on 95th percentile on 1G commit. You put into the same cabinet your edge nodes that actually would be pushing the traffic out and use AWS or GCP for your compute workloads.
To be fair, Netflix only runs some of their infrastructure on AWS. Basically, if I understand correctly, their applications run on AWS and their delivery is through their own CDN built on top of various ISPs[1].
Correct, but some is probably an understatment. They are pretty much run everyting on AWS except what you cited (e.g video processing and content delivery). Netflix is the biggest AWS user.
> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.
They have a completely different use case that benefits from being able to scale up and down quickly. I don't see them moving away from AWS anytime soon.
AWS doesn't even let you do BGP. If you want to use them for a CDN, you're monopolized into their network and their blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.
They might be using AWS for the canonical store of data, but the sanity of using "the cloud" goes out the window the second you need to ship a lot of traffic to the public internet.