You're (probably intentionally) ignoring a huge point. As pointed out in the summary, the agreements also prohibit the leasing of the already existing fiber lines:
and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations.
So it's not just that the government can't operate an ISP, it's that nobody else can. And before you try and say it's not fair that the cable company had to run their own lines, while the government ran them for these other ISPs, keep in mind these points:
1. The competing ISPs would still have to pay for the lines.
2. The cable companies have received huge subsidies from the government.
Personally, I *want* "fast lanes" because they remove popular traffic off the main transit links.
Okay, now I know something's up. I also see that all of your recent comments pro-big-corporate-ISP. What you're pretending to not understand is that "fast lane" doesn't mean fast lane, it means everything else is slow lane. They're not talking about building out new faster infrastructure. And it's not simply about peering, it's about charging providers extra to provide this "fast lane" which amounts to "give us money or we're gonna slow you down."
My home town, Burbank, CA has metro fiber for businesses. Studios love it. The fiber is actually owned by the cable company. Heh!
See! You think fiber is okay if it's the cable company making a profit on it, but not if it's a competing ISP.
I'm not pro-big-ISP, I'm just skeptical of FCC regulation. There is a difference. I am also convinced that most people have no idea how the Internet works. My comment about Burbank just a funny thing. It works just like you want. Burbank doesn't own the fiber, it is owned by the "evil" big-ISP. They just sub-out to the cable company for maintaining a neutral network that all businesses can connect to. Transit is optional and doesn't have to be provided by the cable company. Burbank had a huge incentive to do this because of all the studios in the area. They needed high speed point to point links to send large amounts of data.
It has been implemented this way already. Starting with Yahoo! years ago. AOL too. If a company has a large national network, they can deliver data to peering points bypassing expensive transit links. Do you think Yahoo! and AOL had unfair advantages?
Net neutrality as was originally defined was that packets shouldn't be treated any different than any other packet. The idea was to prevent traffic shaping. I pointed out, quite awhile ago, that no shaping had to be done. All a company would have to do is let some ports get congested and upgrade ports that serviced their preferred services. Few seemed understood this point. I also wondered exactly how this would be regulated since peering is an integral part of how the Internet works. Fast forward to present. Now everyone is talking about peering. Welcome all! This was my point all along. I just feared the day when people would realize this point. I don't want the government approving every single stupid change an ISP has to make to their peering. It sounds like a regulatory disaster. More lobbying, more corruption. The best way to solve the problem is to pressure local governments to open up right of ways. The cable companies can sue. Let them.
Even if they sub contract out the work, I'd rather not have the government be my ISP. The right way to go is to get local governments to change rules allowing easier permitting for others to run fiber. I want competition, not government ISP. That is where real change can happen.
Personally, I *want* "fast lanes" because they remove popular traffic off the main transit links. The cost of those fast lanes get passed on to customers that subscribe to things like Netflix. For people that don't have Netflix, they get less traffic on the links they care about. Even with cost to Netflix, it may still be cheaper for them than sending bulk data over their own transit links. It is a win-win.
Stop trying to make rules for how the Internet works. Peering, even if it isn't settlement-free, is a good thing. People, use your brains!
My home town, Burbank, CA has metro fiber for businesses. Studios love it. The fiber is actually owned by the cable company. Heh!
If it was only about equal traffic in both directions netflix could just have all their clients send random data back to their servers and then just drop all the data. That would increase the overall network load, but it would be "balanced".
Seriously, it makes no sense that increasing the overall network load would reduce the fees being paid. That's ridiculous.
It is based on needs. A company needs to deliver their traffic to a network. That network also needs to deliver their traffic to the company. It would usually go over transit which can cost a lot of money. As a business decision, they decided to send each other's traffic and call it even. This is not rocket science people! It is business! Generating random data doesn't help, because it is not fulfilling the need of one of the networks to deliver their data. In a content to eyeballs situation it is pretty clear which way the demand is.
I read a article only recently that described Google's setup at their first colo. They needed to send data to their customers. That is what the colo normally does: host servers that send content to eyeballs. Google on the other hand needed send and receive so that they could connect to web servers around the world and index them. Google cut a deal with the colo to give them dedicated connections for their indexers at a reduced rate. Why? The colo had symmetrical links. Most content flowed out of them, with little flowing in. Google needed lots of *incoming* bandwidth. Simple supply and demand. The colo had a huge amount of incoming bandwidth that no one was using. That makes it cheap!
The the peering costs may still be cheaper than their transit
Comcast was also degrading Netflix's Transit providers, Cogent and L3.
They didn't have to "degrade" anything. Cogent was sending data at a higher rate than the port allowed causing congestion. All Comcast had to do is stand back and watch it happen. Cogent should have moved Netflix traffic to another port outside of existing peering agreements. And that is basically what happened when Netflix took over and setup their own peering agreements.
> the existing infrastructure (yes, copper) works well for speeds up to what Google Fiber is offering and more (100Mbps - 1Gbps).
Explain how you can do that and we can both become billionaires.
Easy! Just bring fiber to the neighborhood. Then install a box next to the PSTN punch down box for the neighborhood. Then run power to the box. Then install a VDSL+ DSLAM. Profit! This is how AT&T u-verse works. Problem is even AT&T has trouble getting permits for their boxes. Not to mention getting fiber to the box requires permits. I wonder why so few companies try this? Maybe this is easier said than done. Oh well.
If people want better Internet in their area, complain to the city. Try to make it easier for companies like Google Fiber to provides last mile. Complaining to the FCC will just make things worse. Can you imagine if the peering review process went smoother depending on political connections?
Based on what is happening with video these days, I don't know that video is all that profitable. People are not subscribing to video anymore and the content providers are raising their rates, which causes higher sub costs, which causes more people to stop subscribing. On the other hand, everyone wants Internet for their iTunes video. The only real money in video is live sports.
The main point of your response is that it isn't fair. So what? Netflix is willing to pay for now. If you want real movement on this issue doesn't wine to the FCC, get involved with your local government to encourage more last mile providers. Heck, why don't *you* buy some fiber and setup your own ISP. Setup some high speed wireless links. Join a mesh meetup or create one. Beam to a block and run fiber down the boarder of the properties. That is what we did with some high rise MDU's.
Netflix paying for peering is not ransom. Paying for peering is what happens all the time. Even if you have a "settlement-free" peering link, you will still have to pay if traffic going one direction goes outside what is considered acceptable in the contract. Netflix would rather pay for peering than increase their transit costs. Simple as that. It is a business decision. It would have been interesting if Netflix decided to cut all peering so that Netflix traffic would have flooded ISP's transit links. *Everyone* would have started to complain. What would the cable companies do in that situation? If they started to shape the traffic from Netflix, then things would get interesting. This "fast lane" talk is stupid.
They list their peering policy as Selective in their peeringdb entry https://www.peeringdb.com/priv.... They should have an open peering policy. Or is only open if you are a interesting content provider?
Probably. So what is wrong with that? "Interesting" to Google Fiber would be a content provider that is starting to use up enough transit bandwidth that it makes sense to move them to a peering port. That is always how things have worked on the Internet.
...even if some party has to pay for it. Google is an ISP so their peering traffic is not equal. It is good for them and their customers to peer with as many popular content providers as possible. Connect eyeballs to content. I keep pointing out that Yahoo! did this years ago with huge success. It was reported that Yahoo! only payed for half of their total bandwidth requirements. That is, only half of their total bandwidth requirements were going over transit. This was years ago. "Fast lanes" are not new.
The difference with Netflix is that they had to pay the ISP for their peering. This is new. Even so, it still may work out for them. The the peering costs may still be cheaper than their transit or using a third party CDN. Like Google Fiber pointed out, peering does not prioritize traffic, it just makes links to networks. If peering is an unfair fastlane, then the Internet has always been "unfair" since peering is an integral part of the Internet.
So why does Netflix have to pay? It is called supply and demand. The market pressures are such that Netflix *wants* to pay to get their data delivered directly. I suppose they could have backed off and stopped using any sort of CDN with peering to ISPs. But then their transit costs would have gone up. I suppose Netflix could have done this and really slammed the ISP's transit connections until *every* customer was complaining about terrible performance. Netflix decided it was less expensive and better for their customers to pay ISP's for peering. Is this fair? As the saying goes, "Life is not fair." Deal with it.
The best way to deal with the situation is for cities to encourage new ISP's to build out last mile connections. Make it easy without a lot of red tape. Phone companies and cable companies will yell and scream, but there is nothing they can do legally. It is up to the city to manage right-of-way so that things don't get messy. So instead of complaining to the FCC, go to your city council and see what can be done to encourage Google Fiber to come to your city.
Absolutely! But there are cases where IaaS is useful. Combining IaaS with docker by way of something like OpenShift (RedHat's PaaS) is very powerful. I think that is the direction that everything will go. OpenStack will be there, but a bit more hidden. People will use higher level API to handle deployment of their apps. OpenStack is just the API to build those higher level services. That means that something like OpenStack is still needed. That also means that hardware that works with OpenStack is very useful. It helps standardize the idea of automatically building out entire infrastructures.
To really make use of the cloud, don't put traditional apps on it. It is not designed to run things like MS Exchange.
If you work in a software development shop, especially a web app, then cloud is awesome. Think of cloud as an API. That is where the real power is!
We have a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The entire deployment is described in software using Amazon's API. We abstract our infrastructure as code so we can replace it with Openstack if we need to. Amazon's API far ahead of anything else out there, so right now we don't really need to switch. This system is extremely powerful. We can bring up entire testing environments the the execution of a script. In system configuration is driven with Chef, but even some of those scripts use the Amazon API to help discover information about the environment.
VMWare provides some of the features, but nothing like Amazon offers. VMWare is also designed for a traditional IT cycle where you can about running a VM for more than a year. Cloud thinking makes more using of disposable nodes. A machine may not last a month because it is replaced with an entirely new image.
So, IF you write software correctly, having an in-house cloud API is extremely useful. Having a cloud API that a standard is also very useful. Start small with a public provider (Rackspace), then bring in-house as the business grows (RedHat Openstack). When the business needs somethings more elastic, that same API can be used with third party providers to supply the computing when it is demanded (Rackspace).
I have my doubts that more FCC control over the Internet will cause less money to flow into politics. I also have doubts that just because the government is involved that there will be less playing of favorites. I can see the disaster coming when the FCC has their say in peering because of the Netflix deal. If a company gave to the right party in power, then that company gets their peering arrangements approved faster than ones that do not. Yeah, right, the government is *never* corrupt.
That is settlement-free peering. Peering is just two networks trading traffic. It does not have to be equal. Being equal just means that it makes it a no-brainer business decision.
Ummm... No. Peering agreements have always been setup that the party that sends more than is received, pays. If they are almost equal, then it is settlement free. Netflix is doing nothing new. The article even states that the Netflix case will be looked over at a later time.
Ummmm... peering is how the Internet works. If the traffic is not equal both directions, then someone pays. This is the way it has always been. Why is everyone so worked up about it? NOTHING NEW HERE!
Yahoo! did this YEARS ago. They had their own national network for their own traffic. They would directly peer with large ISPs so their content did not have to travel over transit connections. It was stated that Yahoo! only payed for half of their total bandwidth because the peering reduced the cost of their transit.
Netflix is doing exactly the same thing. Only their bandwidth requirements are much bigger than Yahoo!'s.
You are presuming a contract breach by Netflix. I've seen nothing to indicate that any "agreement" was changed or not followed. Do you know what the agreement was that you are asserting wasn't followed?
The Internet was "originally" not designed as you describe. Current agreements lean towards ISPs paying for downstreams, not upstreams. In "fairness" the users who paid for Internet Access are the ones paying for the Internet, and the ISP is required to deliver it. Small ISPs solve this by buying transit. Large ISPs have enough content/connections that others pay them for transit. They should have been paying Netflix for transit, as Netflix was generating the content.
If content didn't cost, why do so many ISPs pay Google and Akami to reduce their demands for content?
Netflix didn't breach contract. Cogent did by going outside the agreed ratio for peering. When that happens, the person taking on the extra traffic gets payed to transport it. Cogent wasn't prepared to handle all the extra traffic Netflix generated. They needed to charge Netflix more for the service so they could cover their transport costs with their peers. They also needed to upgrade the links.
Again, nothing to do with net neutrality. It is just business.
The told the ISPs to go to hell, they'd do what they wanted rather than get themselves locked into an agreement that my prevent them from saving money on a better peering deal down the road. Netflix forced the Net Neutrality issue on the ISPs and the ISPs unfortunately won.
No, they were trusting that Cogent would deliver the content. Cogent had peering agreements with ISP's but didn't want to upgrade or pay for when the bandwidth ratio went outside of the agreement. So, Netflix is doing it themselves. They are doing what Yahoo! did years ago. Nothing new here. It has *nothing* to do with net neutrality.
Yes, I know Cogent is a large network provider. I am a Cogent customer. Some articles I have read referred to Cogent's relationship to Netflix as a CDN despite the fact that Cogent does not offer a CDN service. Netflix was building their own CDN using Cogent Here’s How The Comcast & Netflix Deal Is Structured, With Data & Numbers. I wasn't completely comfortable with the term when I first read it, but it did make sense that Netflix was using Cogent's peering to deliver content to ISP's and to their content caching boxes. If it makes you feel better, I will stop referring to their relationship as a CDN
Deliberately harming traffic from Cogent to hamper Netflix is anti-consumer, and in a regulated market, should be illegal.
Did they actively *harm* Cogent? If the original agreement was settlement-free peering and Netflix changed that balance dramatically, who is at fault? It seems to me the right way to handle the situation is for Netflix to come in and create a new peering agreement that is not settlement free. Just like Yahoo! did 10-15 years ago. The problem is that Netflix is way more demanding than Yahoo! ever was. ISP's saw Yahoo!'s imbalanced peering a win-win. Netflix has a harder sell because the huge amount of data that is required to stream HD content. So Netflix payed for it. What is wrong with that?
If I'm a new up and coming video streaming service, I might initially pay for transit. Once it get bit enough and transit is costing me way too much and putting demands on ISP's transit, we may come to an agreement to peer. Maybe it is a free agreement. Maybe I have to pay for the peering, but it might save me the cost of transit. This is all a business decision and shouldn't have the government sticking their nose into it.
They weren't traffic shaping Netflix traffic. Netflix was depending on Cogent peering. Cogent had existing agreements. Netflix created the imbalance which violated those agreements. The ISP had no reason to upgrade those ports. Netflix could have stopped using those ports entirely as the expense of causing higher transit prices for themselves. Instead they choose to make a new, entirely different agreement to accommodate the imbalance and keep peering. It might eventually be a win-win situation. Netflix may reduce their bandwidth requirement in other places in exchange for paying for peering with ISP's. Again, Yahoo! was doing this *years* ago.
Someone actually pointed out something I've been saying for a while. My point was that traffic shaping rules don't make any sense if an ISP peers with preferred providers of services. Say they want to provide quality VoIP. They don't need to shape competitors packets, they just need to keep their VoIP traffic off congested links. Duh! Net neutrality rules wouldn't have covered peering.
So now the government is talking about regulating peering. I feared this would happen once someone woke up to how the Internet actually works. I really don't see how any good can come of this. As I've stated previously, there was an article YEARS ago that pointed out that Yahoo! only paid for half of their bandwidth requirements. They had their own national network that they would deliver content directly to ISP's. It was a win-win because the traffic would stay off the transit links of both Yahoo! and the ISP's. They were connecting content to eyeballs. It wasn't traditional settlement-free peering, but it was a good thing. Nothing wrong with it. Peering is good. Why should the government get involved with this?
As far as Netflix is concerned, they painted themselves into a corner. They used a CDN (Cogent) that had settlement-free peering with many networks. Once Netflix started sending their traffic over those links it broke the settlement-free agreement. Netflix might have been in a better position if they didn't use a CDN and all their traffic went over transit. Then make agreements directly with the large ISP's that didn't involve existing peering ports.
There is only one solution to this problem: get big money out of politics. And we can actually do this.
How about we get big power out of government and then there would be less reason to send big money to politicians? Heavy regulation just begs for buying off politicians. Keep things simple. Allow the market to be as open as possible and let companies and people decide what in their best interest works for them.
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I want competition, not government ISP.
You're (probably intentionally) ignoring a huge point. As pointed out in the summary, the agreements also prohibit the leasing of the already existing fiber lines:
and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations.
So it's not just that the government can't operate an ISP, it's that nobody else can. And before you try and say it's not fair that the cable company had to run their own lines, while the government ran them for these other ISPs, keep in mind these points: 1. The competing ISPs would still have to pay for the lines. 2. The cable companies have received huge subsidies from the government.
Personally, I *want* "fast lanes" because they remove popular traffic off the main transit links.
Okay, now I know something's up. I also see that all of your recent comments pro-big-corporate-ISP. What you're pretending to not understand is that "fast lane" doesn't mean fast lane, it means everything else is slow lane. They're not talking about building out new faster infrastructure. And it's not simply about peering, it's about charging providers extra to provide this "fast lane" which amounts to "give us money or we're gonna slow you down."
My home town, Burbank, CA has metro fiber for businesses. Studios love it. The fiber is actually owned by the cable company. Heh!
See! You think fiber is okay if it's the cable company making a profit on it, but not if it's a competing ISP.
I'm not pro-big-ISP, I'm just skeptical of FCC regulation. There is a difference. I am also convinced that most people have no idea how the Internet works. My comment about Burbank just a funny thing. It works just like you want. Burbank doesn't own the fiber, it is owned by the "evil" big-ISP. They just sub-out to the cable company for maintaining a neutral network that all businesses can connect to. Transit is optional and doesn't have to be provided by the cable company. Burbank had a huge incentive to do this because of all the studios in the area. They needed high speed point to point links to send large amounts of data.
It has been implemented this way already. Starting with Yahoo! years ago. AOL too. If a company has a large national network, they can deliver data to peering points bypassing expensive transit links. Do you think Yahoo! and AOL had unfair advantages?
Net neutrality as was originally defined was that packets shouldn't be treated any different than any other packet. The idea was to prevent traffic shaping. I pointed out, quite awhile ago, that no shaping had to be done. All a company would have to do is let some ports get congested and upgrade ports that serviced their preferred services. Few seemed understood this point. I also wondered exactly how this would be regulated since peering is an integral part of how the Internet works. Fast forward to present. Now everyone is talking about peering. Welcome all! This was my point all along. I just feared the day when people would realize this point. I don't want the government approving every single stupid change an ISP has to make to their peering. It sounds like a regulatory disaster. More lobbying, more corruption. The best way to solve the problem is to pressure local governments to open up right of ways. The cable companies can sue. Let them.
Even if they sub contract out the work, I'd rather not have the government be my ISP. The right way to go is to get local governments to change rules allowing easier permitting for others to run fiber. I want competition, not government ISP. That is where real change can happen.
Personally, I *want* "fast lanes" because they remove popular traffic off the main transit links. The cost of those fast lanes get passed on to customers that subscribe to things like Netflix. For people that don't have Netflix, they get less traffic on the links they care about. Even with cost to Netflix, it may still be cheaper for them than sending bulk data over their own transit links. It is a win-win.
Stop trying to make rules for how the Internet works. Peering, even if it isn't settlement-free, is a good thing. People, use your brains!
My home town, Burbank, CA has metro fiber for businesses. Studios love it. The fiber is actually owned by the cable company. Heh!
If it was only about equal traffic in both directions netflix could just have all their clients send random data back to their servers and then just drop all the data. That would increase the overall network load, but it would be "balanced".
Seriously, it makes no sense that increasing the overall network load would reduce the fees being paid. That's ridiculous.
It is based on needs. A company needs to deliver their traffic to a network. That network also needs to deliver their traffic to the company. It would usually go over transit which can cost a lot of money. As a business decision, they decided to send each other's traffic and call it even. This is not rocket science people! It is business! Generating random data doesn't help, because it is not fulfilling the need of one of the networks to deliver their data. In a content to eyeballs situation it is pretty clear which way the demand is.
I read a article only recently that described Google's setup at their first colo. They needed to send data to their customers. That is what the colo normally does: host servers that send content to eyeballs. Google on the other hand needed send and receive so that they could connect to web servers around the world and index them. Google cut a deal with the colo to give them dedicated connections for their indexers at a reduced rate. Why? The colo had symmetrical links. Most content flowed out of them, with little flowing in. Google needed lots of *incoming* bandwidth. Simple supply and demand. The colo had a huge amount of incoming bandwidth that no one was using. That makes it cheap!
Does no one understand simple economics anymore?
The the peering costs may still be cheaper than their transit
Comcast was also degrading Netflix's Transit providers, Cogent and L3.
They didn't have to "degrade" anything. Cogent was sending data at a higher rate than the port allowed causing congestion. All Comcast had to do is stand back and watch it happen. Cogent should have moved Netflix traffic to another port outside of existing peering agreements. And that is basically what happened when Netflix took over and setup their own peering agreements.
> the existing infrastructure (yes, copper) works well for speeds up to what Google Fiber is offering and more (100Mbps - 1Gbps).
Explain how you can do that and we can both become billionaires.
Easy! Just bring fiber to the neighborhood. Then install a box next to the PSTN punch down box for the neighborhood. Then run power to the box. Then install a VDSL+ DSLAM. Profit! This is how AT&T u-verse works. Problem is even AT&T has trouble getting permits for their boxes. Not to mention getting fiber to the box requires permits. I wonder why so few companies try this? Maybe this is easier said than done. Oh well.
If people want better Internet in their area, complain to the city. Try to make it easier for companies like Google Fiber to provides last mile. Complaining to the FCC will just make things worse. Can you imagine if the peering review process went smoother depending on political connections?
Based on what is happening with video these days, I don't know that video is all that profitable. People are not subscribing to video anymore and the content providers are raising their rates, which causes higher sub costs, which causes more people to stop subscribing. On the other hand, everyone wants Internet for their iTunes video. The only real money in video is live sports.
The main point of your response is that it isn't fair. So what? Netflix is willing to pay for now. If you want real movement on this issue doesn't wine to the FCC, get involved with your local government to encourage more last mile providers. Heck, why don't *you* buy some fiber and setup your own ISP. Setup some high speed wireless links. Join a mesh meetup or create one. Beam to a block and run fiber down the boarder of the properties. That is what we did with some high rise MDU's.
Paying for peering *never* ever happened before Netflix? Really?
Netflix paying for peering is not ransom. Paying for peering is what happens all the time. Even if you have a "settlement-free" peering link, you will still have to pay if traffic going one direction goes outside what is considered acceptable in the contract. Netflix would rather pay for peering than increase their transit costs. Simple as that. It is a business decision. It would have been interesting if Netflix decided to cut all peering so that Netflix traffic would have flooded ISP's transit links. *Everyone* would have started to complain. What would the cable companies do in that situation? If they started to shape the traffic from Netflix, then things would get interesting. This "fast lane" talk is stupid.
They list their peering policy as Selective in their peeringdb entry https://www.peeringdb.com/priv.... They should have an open peering policy. Or is only open if you are a interesting content provider?
Probably. So what is wrong with that? "Interesting" to Google Fiber would be a content provider that is starting to use up enough transit bandwidth that it makes sense to move them to a peering port. That is always how things have worked on the Internet.
...even if some party has to pay for it. Google is an ISP so their peering traffic is not equal. It is good for them and their customers to peer with as many popular content providers as possible. Connect eyeballs to content. I keep pointing out that Yahoo! did this years ago with huge success. It was reported that Yahoo! only payed for half of their total bandwidth requirements. That is, only half of their total bandwidth requirements were going over transit. This was years ago. "Fast lanes" are not new.
The difference with Netflix is that they had to pay the ISP for their peering. This is new. Even so, it still may work out for them. The the peering costs may still be cheaper than their transit or using a third party CDN. Like Google Fiber pointed out, peering does not prioritize traffic, it just makes links to networks. If peering is an unfair fastlane, then the Internet has always been "unfair" since peering is an integral part of the Internet.
So why does Netflix have to pay? It is called supply and demand. The market pressures are such that Netflix *wants* to pay to get their data delivered directly. I suppose they could have backed off and stopped using any sort of CDN with peering to ISPs. But then their transit costs would have gone up. I suppose Netflix could have done this and really slammed the ISP's transit connections until *every* customer was complaining about terrible performance. Netflix decided it was less expensive and better for their customers to pay ISP's for peering. Is this fair? As the saying goes, "Life is not fair." Deal with it.
The best way to deal with the situation is for cities to encourage new ISP's to build out last mile connections. Make it easy without a lot of red tape. Phone companies and cable companies will yell and scream, but there is nothing they can do legally. It is up to the city to manage right-of-way so that things don't get messy. So instead of complaining to the FCC, go to your city council and see what can be done to encourage Google Fiber to come to your city.
Absolutely! But there are cases where IaaS is useful. Combining IaaS with docker by way of something like OpenShift (RedHat's PaaS) is very powerful. I think that is the direction that everything will go. OpenStack will be there, but a bit more hidden. People will use higher level API to handle deployment of their apps. OpenStack is just the API to build those higher level services. That means that something like OpenStack is still needed. That also means that hardware that works with OpenStack is very useful. It helps standardize the idea of automatically building out entire infrastructures.
To really make use of the cloud, don't put traditional apps on it. It is not designed to run things like MS Exchange.
If you work in a software development shop, especially a web app, then cloud is awesome. Think of cloud as an API. That is where the real power is!
We have a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The entire deployment is described in software using Amazon's API. We abstract our infrastructure as code so we can replace it with Openstack if we need to. Amazon's API far ahead of anything else out there, so right now we don't really need to switch. This system is extremely powerful. We can bring up entire testing environments the the execution of a script. In system configuration is driven with Chef, but even some of those scripts use the Amazon API to help discover information about the environment.
VMWare provides some of the features, but nothing like Amazon offers. VMWare is also designed for a traditional IT cycle where you can about running a VM for more than a year. Cloud thinking makes more using of disposable nodes. A machine may not last a month because it is replaced with an entirely new image.
So, IF you write software correctly, having an in-house cloud API is extremely useful. Having a cloud API that a standard is also very useful. Start small with a public provider (Rackspace), then bring in-house as the business grows (RedHat Openstack). When the business needs somethings more elastic, that same API can be used with third party providers to supply the computing when it is demanded (Rackspace).
Cloud API's are new. Give it time.
I have my doubts that more FCC control over the Internet will cause less money to flow into politics. I also have doubts that just because the government is involved that there will be less playing of favorites. I can see the disaster coming when the FCC has their say in peering because of the Netflix deal. If a company gave to the right party in power, then that company gets their peering arrangements approved faster than ones that do not. Yeah, right, the government is *never* corrupt.
Peering is between _peers_, approximate equals.
That is settlement-free peering. Peering is just two networks trading traffic. It does not have to be equal. Being equal just means that it makes it a no-brainer business decision.
Ummm... No. Peering agreements have always been setup that the party that sends more than is received, pays. If they are almost equal, then it is settlement free. Netflix is doing nothing new. The article even states that the Netflix case will be looked over at a later time.
Ummmm... peering is how the Internet works. If the traffic is not equal both directions, then someone pays. This is the way it has always been. Why is everyone so worked up about it? NOTHING NEW HERE!
Yahoo! did this YEARS ago. They had their own national network for their own traffic. They would directly peer with large ISPs so their content did not have to travel over transit connections. It was stated that Yahoo! only payed for half of their total bandwidth because the peering reduced the cost of their transit.
Netflix is doing exactly the same thing. Only their bandwidth requirements are much bigger than Yahoo!'s.
You are presuming a contract breach by Netflix. I've seen nothing to indicate that any "agreement" was changed or not followed. Do you know what the agreement was that you are asserting wasn't followed? The Internet was "originally" not designed as you describe. Current agreements lean towards ISPs paying for downstreams, not upstreams. In "fairness" the users who paid for Internet Access are the ones paying for the Internet, and the ISP is required to deliver it. Small ISPs solve this by buying transit. Large ISPs have enough content/connections that others pay them for transit. They should have been paying Netflix for transit, as Netflix was generating the content. If content didn't cost, why do so many ISPs pay Google and Akami to reduce their demands for content?
Netflix didn't breach contract. Cogent did by going outside the agreed ratio for peering. When that happens, the person taking on the extra traffic gets payed to transport it. Cogent wasn't prepared to handle all the extra traffic Netflix generated. They needed to charge Netflix more for the service so they could cover their transport costs with their peers. They also needed to upgrade the links.
Again, nothing to do with net neutrality. It is just business.
The told the ISPs to go to hell, they'd do what they wanted rather than get themselves locked into an agreement that my prevent them from saving money on a better peering deal down the road. Netflix forced the Net Neutrality issue on the ISPs and the ISPs unfortunately won.
No, they were trusting that Cogent would deliver the content. Cogent had peering agreements with ISP's but didn't want to upgrade or pay for when the bandwidth ratio went outside of the agreement. So, Netflix is doing it themselves. They are doing what Yahoo! did years ago. Nothing new here. It has *nothing* to do with net neutrality.
Yes, I know Cogent is a large network provider. I am a Cogent customer. Some articles I have read referred to Cogent's relationship to Netflix as a CDN despite the fact that Cogent does not offer a CDN service. Netflix was building their own CDN using Cogent Here’s How The Comcast & Netflix Deal Is Structured, With Data & Numbers. I wasn't completely comfortable with the term when I first read it, but it did make sense that Netflix was using Cogent's peering to deliver content to ISP's and to their content caching boxes. If it makes you feel better, I will stop referring to their relationship as a CDN
Deliberately harming traffic from Cogent to hamper Netflix is anti-consumer, and in a regulated market, should be illegal.
Did they actively *harm* Cogent? If the original agreement was settlement-free peering and Netflix changed that balance dramatically, who is at fault? It seems to me the right way to handle the situation is for Netflix to come in and create a new peering agreement that is not settlement free. Just like Yahoo! did 10-15 years ago. The problem is that Netflix is way more demanding than Yahoo! ever was. ISP's saw Yahoo!'s imbalanced peering a win-win. Netflix has a harder sell because the huge amount of data that is required to stream HD content. So Netflix payed for it. What is wrong with that?
If I'm a new up and coming video streaming service, I might initially pay for transit. Once it get bit enough and transit is costing me way too much and putting demands on ISP's transit, we may come to an agreement to peer. Maybe it is a free agreement. Maybe I have to pay for the peering, but it might save me the cost of transit. This is all a business decision and shouldn't have the government sticking their nose into it.
They weren't traffic shaping Netflix traffic. Netflix was depending on Cogent peering. Cogent had existing agreements. Netflix created the imbalance which violated those agreements. The ISP had no reason to upgrade those ports. Netflix could have stopped using those ports entirely as the expense of causing higher transit prices for themselves. Instead they choose to make a new, entirely different agreement to accommodate the imbalance and keep peering. It might eventually be a win-win situation. Netflix may reduce their bandwidth requirement in other places in exchange for paying for peering with ISP's. Again, Yahoo! was doing this *years* ago.
Someone actually pointed out something I've been saying for a while. My point was that traffic shaping rules don't make any sense if an ISP peers with preferred providers of services. Say they want to provide quality VoIP. They don't need to shape competitors packets, they just need to keep their VoIP traffic off congested links. Duh! Net neutrality rules wouldn't have covered peering.
So now the government is talking about regulating peering. I feared this would happen once someone woke up to how the Internet actually works. I really don't see how any good can come of this. As I've stated previously, there was an article YEARS ago that pointed out that Yahoo! only paid for half of their bandwidth requirements. They had their own national network that they would deliver content directly to ISP's. It was a win-win because the traffic would stay off the transit links of both Yahoo! and the ISP's. They were connecting content to eyeballs. It wasn't traditional settlement-free peering, but it was a good thing. Nothing wrong with it. Peering is good. Why should the government get involved with this?
As far as Netflix is concerned, they painted themselves into a corner. They used a CDN (Cogent) that had settlement-free peering with many networks. Once Netflix started sending their traffic over those links it broke the settlement-free agreement. Netflix might have been in a better position if they didn't use a CDN and all their traffic went over transit. Then make agreements directly with the large ISP's that didn't involve existing peering ports.
There is only one solution to this problem: get big money out of politics. And we can actually do this.
How about we get big power out of government and then there would be less reason to send big money to politicians? Heavy regulation just begs for buying off politicians. Keep things simple. Allow the market to be as open as possible and let companies and people decide what in their best interest works for them.