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Comment by noahl | Hacker News Reader

This is true, but I think there's another point that's even more significant: not all network access is the same. In particular, putting some machines in a rack in a colo and connecting to the nearest Internet exchange is really not comparable to Google's networking, which is essentially a worldwide second Internet that is faster and more reliable than the normal Internet, and which carries your packets as far as possible towards their destination before dropping them off at a POP.

(Note: I worked for Google until 3 days ago.)

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Can't agree more. I balked at the cost (still sort of do as a GCP user) until I joined Google and was able to peek behind the curtain. The network quality is absurd. GCP customers pay a premium for having the same network reach as Google. Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible.

Not only that, but Google's datacenters have 24/7 attention, lots of redundant providers, etc.. A bargain basement colo won't be nearly as reliable.

Yes, you're right, and you mentioned something else that I forgot to. A lot of people here are comparing Big 3 network costs to the cost of hiring a single network administrator. The correct comparison is to the cost of hiring a team big enough to staff a 24-hour on call rotation with a 5 minute response time SLA.

>Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible.

The benefit of this has can't be understated. In SE Asia connecting to their Taiwan region from most places I'm literally just at the mercy of a few local hops at level 3 due to their extensive remote peering. Staying on the Google network is also interesting to observe when connecting between Google Compute data centers.

AWS and Azure behave considerably different.

...and how many people need that? I would gladly 1/3 of the cost for 4 nines over 5 nines. (or whatever SLA they offer).

Not everyone need a ritzy ultra reliable network. It costs way too much and hardly any customer is going to get comparable value out of it.

Their business customers probably really do care. Companies run off of AWS and GCP. I'm sure that spotify and Snapchat and Netflix get considerable value from those guarantees.

I agree! This is a real issue for cloud providers currently. You shouldn't have to pay for the super-reliable fast network if you don't want it.

And people don't have to! People can self host instead :-)

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