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 <patr...@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 <merculi...@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=na...@bakker.net> > wrote: > >> * nanog@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