wow, lots of akamai

Thu Apr 1 20:46:25 UTC 2021

>
> A user sends a few megabytes of request and receives 50 gigs of reply.
> They aren't DDoSing the network, but they're amplifying a single 50 gig
> copy they receive from the mothership and turning it into likely tens of
> terabytes of traffic.
> Yes, that's a CDN's job, but that volume of legitimate traffic and the
> very tiny window with which it is transmitted is likely to be a burden for
> even the largest residential ISPs.
>

I'm sitting at home, and I could send a 50k request for a 50G file right
now from a source not fronted by a CDN. What do? My ISP is still has to
deliver it to me. The fact that the 50G file does or does not come from a
CDN is irrelevant. The CDN just happens to be a point source that a lot of
users happen to connect to.

CDNs want to have the best performance to users because that's what brings
them business. A poorly performing CDN will lose customers to a better
performing one. The trend for years has been instead of ISPs investing in
infrastructure to effectively handle the traffic that their users request,
they turf that to CDNs. In many cases, a CDN will put a cache box in or
extend a circuit at a loss to them, because they know if the performance
metrics get bad, business will be taken elsewhere, even if the CAUSE of the
poor performance is actually at the edge of, or inside , the ISPs network.

ISPs in the US can get away with this because their users are captive and
rarely have an alternative choice of provider.

On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 4:33 PM Matt Erculiani <merculiani at gmail.com> wrote:

> Patrick,
>
> > First, to be blunt, if you really think Akamai nodes are “sitting idle
> for weeks” before CoD comes out with a new game,
> > you are clearly confused.
>
> "Idle" in the sense that when you look at a graph of traffic before and
> after a large push such as this makes the rest of the week's traffic look
> like a horizontal line at the bottom, admittedly poor word choice, yes, but
> far from "confused" as to what CDNs do under relatively normal
> circumstances. Otherwise very valid points you've raised.
>
> Tom,
>
> > Akamai, and other CDNs, do not **generate** traffic ; they serve the
> requests generated by users.
>
> A user sends a few megabytes of request and receives 50 gigs of reply.
> They aren't DDoSing the network, but they're amplifying a single 50 gig
> copy they receive from the mothership and turning it into likely tens of
> terabytes of traffic.
> Yes, that's a CDN's job, but that volume of legitimate traffic and the
> very tiny window with which it is transmitted is likely to be a burden for
> even the largest residential ISPs.
>
> -Matt
>
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 2:09 PM Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick at ianai.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Matt:
>>
>> I am going to disagree with your characterization of how Akamai - and
>> many other CDNs - manage things. First, to be blunt, if you really think
>> Akamai nodes are “sitting idle for weeks” before CoD comes out with a new
>> game, you are clearly confused.
>>
>> More importantly, I know for a fact Akamai has spent ungodly amounts of
>> money & resources putting content precisely where the ISPs ask them to put
>> it, deliver it over the pipes the ISPs ask them to deliver it, at precisely
>> the capacity the ISPs tell them.
>>
>> On the other hand, I agree with your characterization of residential
>> broadband. It is ridiculous to expect a neighborhood with 1,000 homes each
>> with 1 Gbps links to have a terabit of uplink capacity. But it also should
>> have a lot more than 10 Gbps, IMHO. Unfortunately, most neighborhoods I
>> have seen are closer to the latter than the former.
>>
>> Finally, this could quickly devolve into finger pointing. You say the
>> CDNs bear some responsibility? They may well respond that the large
>> broadband providers ask for cash to interconnect - but still require the
>> CDNs to do all the work. The CDNs did not create the content, or tell the
>> users which content to pull. When I pay $NATIONAL_PROVIDER, I expect them
>> to provide me with access to the Internet. Not just to the content that
>> pays that provider.
>>
>> Personally, I have zero problems with the ISPs saying “give me a cache to
>> put here with this sized uplink” or “please deliver to these users over
>> this xconn / IX / whatever”. I have a huge problem with the ISPs blaming
>> the ISPs for delivering what the ISP’s users request.
>>
>> Of course, this could all be solved if there were more competition in
>> broadband in the US (and many other countries). But that is a totally
>> different 10,000 post thread (that we have had many dozens of times).
>>
>> --
>> TTFN,
>> patrick
>>
>> On Apr 1, 2021, at 3:53 PM, Matt Erculiani <merculiani at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Niels,
>>
>> I think to clarify Jean's point, when you buy a 300mbps circuit, you're
>> paying for 300mbps of *internet *access.
>>
>> That does not mean that a network should (and in this case small-medium
>> ones simply can't) build all of their capacity to service a large number of
>> customer circuits at line rate at the same time for an extended
>> period, ESPECIALLY to the exact same endpoint. It's just not economically
>> reasonable to expect that. Remember we're talking about residential service
>> here, not enterprise circuits.
>>
>> Therefore, how do you prevent this spike of [insert large number here]
>> gigabits traversing the network at the same time from causing issues? Build
>> more network? That sounds easy, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons
>> why ISPs can't or don't want to do that, particularly for an event that
>> only occurs once per quarter or so.
>>
>> Does Akamai bear some burden here to make these rollouts less troublesome
>> for the ISPs they traverse through the last mile(s)? IMO yes, yes they do.
>> When you're doing something new and unprecedented, as Akamai frequently
>> brags about on Twitter, like having rapid, bursty growth of traffic, you
>> need to consider that just because you can generate it, doesn't mean it can
>> be delivered.  They've gotta be more sophisticated than a bunch of servers
>> with SSD arrays, ramdisks, and 100 gig interfaces, so there's no excuse for
>> them here to just blindly fill every link they have after sitting idle for
>> weeks/months at a time and expect everything to come out alright and nobody
>> to complain about it.
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 1:21 PM Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> * nanog at nanog.org (Jean St-Laurent via NANOG) [Thu 01 Apr 2021, 21:03
>>> CEST]:
>>> >An artificial roll out penalty somehow? Probably not at the ISP
>>> >level, but more at the game level. Well, ISP could also have some
>>> >mechanisms to reduce the impact or even Akamai could force a
>>> >progressive roll out.
>>>
>>> It's an online game. You can't play the game with outdated assets.
>>> You'd not see walls where other players would, for example.
>>>
>>> What you're suggesting is the ability of ISPs to market Internet access
>>> at a certain speed but not have to deliver it based on conditions they
>>> create.
>>>
>>>
>>>         -- Niels.
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Matt Erculiani
>> ERCUL-ARIN
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Matt Erculiani
> ERCUL-ARIN
>
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