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Yes, the year of the blog should definitely be present in the HN title.

That said, what is the deal with the internal network latency and the other points the OP touched upon today? Did Amazon get around to resolving things, or have things worsened?

My non-rigorous impression is that latency is roughly the same now as it was in 2010, i.e. not great, but at least it hasn't been getting worse.

Have there been any improvements since then?

No, it's still common to have in-house "find a good node" code that fires up and takes down machines until one that will be reliable is found.

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048694

Can you enlighten us? Why is it so slow? Are some people abusing all of that free bandwidth? Is their LAN simply not built to handle much traffic?

I don't have any inside information, but I would guess it's because their san is so sketchy everyone rolls their own DFS and uses other chatty replication strategies, leaving the network running data and disk on the same topology. These days a lot of that traffic will take 4 hops within an AZ.