It would be really cool if it didn't just show the ping, but how much worse it is compared to the theoretical optimum (speed of light in fiber optic medium, which I believe is about 30% slower than c).
I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible in the first place.
I'm under the impression that within the hyperscalers (and probably the big colo/hosting firms, too), this is known. It's important to them, and customers, especially when a customer is trying to architect an HA or DR system and needs to ensure they don't inadvertently choose a region (or even a zone that isn't physically in the same place at other zones in the same region) that has "artificially" (can be for all kinds of legitimate reasons) latency from the primary zone.
This is not an uncommon scenario. My current employer specializes in SAP migrations to cloud and this is now a conversation we have with both AWS & GCP networking specialists when pricing & scoping projects... after having made incorrect assumptions and being bitten by unacceptable latency in the past.
Light in fiber optic cable travels roughly 70% of the speed of light ~210,000 km/s
Earth's circumferences is ~40,000 kilometers.
Direct route from the other side of Earth to another would be roughly 100 milliseconds, round trip 200 ms.
It’s pretty trivial to do this, any big fiber company will provide you with Google Earth KMZ files (protected by NDA) when considering a purchase. This is absolutely necessary when designing a redundant network or if you want lower latency.
Since light travels at 100% the speed of light in a vacuum (by definition), I have wondered if latency over far distances could be improved by sending the data through a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit instead. Though I suspect the set of tradeoffs here (much lower throughput, much higher cost, more jitter in the latency due to satellites constantly moving around relative to the terrestrial surface) probably wouldn't make this worth it for a slight decrease in latency for any use case.
clicking around that map, I don't see any examples where the latency is a long way out of line with the distance.
Obviously it's theoretically possible to do ~40% better by using hollow fibers and as-the-crow-flies fiber routing, but few are willing to pay for that.
The 'practical' way to beat fiber optics is to use either
(i) a series of overground direct microwave connections (often used by trading firms)
(ii) a series of laser links between low altitude satellites. This would be faster in principle for long distances, and presumably Starlink will eventually offer this service to people that are very latency sensitive
The theoretical best latency would be something like speed_of_light_in_fiber/great_circle_distance_between_regions, both of which are pretty easy to find. The first is a constant you can look up, and the second you can compute from coordinates of each region pair.
As a quick workaround, you can set a CSS filter on the whole page: Either use dev tools to put a rule `filter: hue-rotate(60deg);` on the `body` element, or simply run `javascript:void(document.body.style.filter='hue-rotate(60deg)')` from the url bar.
Author here - Thanks for the suggestion Alex. From your perspective, what are some of the best ways you've seen people solve for this in the past? If you have links, please share.
Hi! Thanks for getting back to me, appreciate it. To be honest, I‘m not an expert at all in this topic. I‘d imagine choosing a colorblind-friendly palette (see: https://davidmathlogic.com/colorblind/ ) would be an easy fix. Alternatively, or in addition, you could use dotted/dashed/straight lines to visualize the latency buckets. Might make for an interesting effect?
Also it‘s common to hide this „colorblind mode“ behind a checkbox somewhere. So you don’t have to uglify your product. :-)
Do you have some kind of an accessibility tool for this? Maybe a whole screen filter that changes colors in a specific way so you can distinguish them?
No I don't. It's actually not a big deal in day-to-day life. People often go "But how the hell can you drive if you can't distinguish red from green at the stoplight?"... in reality it's more nuanced. As another comment already mentioned, perception varies across even among colorblind people. I find it hard to distinguish R/G if the colors are not fully saturated or in low-light situation. Also the brain knows that "red is on top" and "green is at the bottom" at the stoplight and thereby improves the contrast for me. ;-)
My comment was meant to raise awareness of this issue with the author of the tool. Many video games, especially the ones with some kind of HUD, minimap, etc. these days have a color-blind mode.
Color-blind man here. While I think it’s important to consider color blindness when choosing colors, it’s not actually 8% of men who would have trouble distinguishing the two colors. That number is somewhat lower. Perception of color varies even across colorblind people so just because someone says it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for someone else, and vice versa.
It's sad that this is the top comment for the post. Many people have stopped posting their crappy work online due to harsh comments like yours. There's no easy reply to your comment.
Maybe we should be less critical specially with "Make it fit for my workflow" type comment, and more so if it is built by some random guy in their free time, and not say a project which is asking money.
I think this an uncharitable take – the parent comment is just proposing an improvement that would really help them given their colour-blindness (they also say they like the visualisation). Personally I find part of the reason for putting things on the internet is to allow other people to use them and obtain their feedback.
This was not a harsh criticism. Accessibility on the web is important, especially if you want people to actually engage with what you have published.
Color blindness is nothing new, there are freely available color blind friendly color plates. Pointing out to the author that they could make a small tweak to make their work more accessible is good feedback and should continue to be given.
Sorry it came across that way, that was not my intent at all… it was meant as a simple suggestion for a potential low-hanging fruit improvement that would benefit people like me.
Clearly you did not perceive it that way.
I totally understand being frustrated about people demanding workflow changes or huge accessibility features, but this is literally just a color swap that can be done with a touch of CSS it's really not a big deal.
Random fact: I did some planning around this for a client a while ago. While measuring the AWS latencies I found I could get approximate latencies (within 10%) by measuring the rough undersea cable length (km) and dividing by 150.
While not overly surprising, it was very consistent.
I read this yeaaaars ago. I'm about to re-read this, but before I do, I think this was the article that installed a little goblin in my brain that screams "TTS" in instances like this. I will edit this if the article confirms/denies this goblin.
Interesting. If you click on one of the blue circles representing a data center, it shows latencies to the other data centers.
This took me a second to figure out — maybe consider adding a note along the lines of “click to select a data center” on the site?
These aren't even data centers, but aggregates. They're regions, composed of many different bits of networking and compute in various levels of abstraction - dc, edge installation, whatever.
Within these regions there's a lot of variation from zone to zone, so the methodology matters.
I appreciate the effort to collect the data, but I think the rotating globe is an idea that looks cool, but makes the visualization harder to use. If I click on us-east-1, there's a 229ms line to...somewhere that I can't see. Meanwhile, I can't see the latency between us-east-1 and us-east-2.
Perhaps if you selected a datacenter, and it switched to a 2-d projection with that datacenter at the center of the map, it would be better?
Or perhaps augment the visualization with a table?
AWS provides latency numbers between regions, AZ's and within an AZ in network manager. Useful to have as a latency baseline and to see if they have any issue.
> AWS provides latency numbers between regions, AZ's and within an AZ in network manager.
AWS also provides dashboards that shows what regions/services are down, and history tells us those are not to be trusted for precisely the same reasons.
Afaik it also requires someone to manually set it to be down on that page. Pretty sure that nobody is entering latency numbers manually every second, but maybe they have a team for that.
Cool visualization and concept. I do wish the colors were on a ramp instead of bucketed. The reason is that it makes 100ms look much worse than 99ms, but equal to 200ms. If you click on us-east-1, for example, the latency to the data centers in Western Europe look quite different with eu-central-1 and eu-south-1 looking completely different even though the latency is only around 9ms difference and eu-north-1 and ap-south-1 look the same even though there's about a 88ms difference!
There's some comments here also wondering about the best possible latency for speed of light vs what these measurements are. The problem with this is that c isn't the propagation velocity of information through fiber, it's some velocity well under c and depends on a number of different factors, many of which are unknowable, such as repeater latency and so on. In practice, the best theoretical value is no higher than 70% of c just measuring the velocity of light in a medium as c measures light in a vacuum.
Author here - The ramping is a really good idea. The current visualization makes a 90ms latency look "good" when in reality, thats totally unacceptable for many applications, especially for things where multiple round-trips need to happen to fulfill a request.
How did you choose which datacenters to include? For example, eu-south-2 (Spain) is missing.
The reason I know is because I worked on a project that required latency to be under 30ms between datacenters, and we had to use eu-west-1 (Ireland) and eu-south-2.
Turns out that latency is closer to 42ms, mainly because there are no undersea cables between Ireland and the continent (they only go to England, then they have to route across England to get to a cable to the content).
> How did you choose which datacenters to include? For example, eu-south-2 (Spain) is missing.
At the bottom of the page it says: «Data scraped from CloudPing», with the CloudPing dataset linked through. If you click through to CloudPing, you won't find «eu-south-2» in the dataset.
Author here - I just used what was available on https://www.cloudping.co, which is certainly missing a few. The CloudPing GitHub repo has not had a code change in 4 years. Maybe a few new regions have popped up since it was last actively worked on.
The data is really useful, and the globe is visually impressive, but it feels like it'd be more practically useful to have a flat world map that shows all the data centers at once and makes it easier to read the lines without them getting excessively close to each other.
Readit News
I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible in the first place.
This is not an uncommon scenario. My current employer specializes in SAP migrations to cloud and this is now a conversation we have with both AWS & GCP networking specialists when pricing & scoping projects... after having made incorrect assumptions and being bitten by unacceptable latency in the past.
[0] https://github.com/mda590/cloudping.co/blob/8918ee8d7e632765...
but you're right
Light in fiber optic cable travels roughly 70% of the speed of light ~210,000 km/s Earth's circumferences is ~40,000 kilometers. Direct route from the other side of Earth to another would be roughly 100 milliseconds, round trip 200 ms.
Obviously it's theoretically possible to do ~40% better by using hollow fibers and as-the-crow-flies fiber routing, but few are willing to pay for that.
(i) a series of overground direct microwave connections (often used by trading firms)
(ii) a series of laser links between low altitude satellites. This would be faster in principle for long distances, and presumably Starlink will eventually offer this service to people that are very latency sensitive
Dead Comment
This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!
Disco mode!
(better to use requestAnimationFrame but I'm lazy atm)
Also it‘s common to hide this „colorblind mode“ behind a checkbox somewhere. So you don’t have to uglify your product. :-)
https://venngage.com/tools/accessible-color-palette-generato... also seems nifty
My comment was meant to raise awareness of this issue with the author of the tool. Many video games, especially the ones with some kind of HUD, minimap, etc. these days have a color-blind mode.
I started putting myself in the shoes of a family member who is in the 8% and now i spend more time trying to pick better color schemes
Those are becoming somewhat more prevalent these days.
Dead Comment
Maybe we should be less critical specially with "Make it fit for my workflow" type comment, and more so if it is built by some random guy in their free time, and not say a project which is asking money.
Color blindness is nothing new, there are freely available color blind friendly color plates. Pointing out to the author that they could make a small tweak to make their work more accessible is good feedback and should continue to be given.
Deleted Comment
While not overly surprising, it was very consistent.
Edit: I think it was actually 155
EDIT: mostly, probably, sort of.
"Through LabVIEW the speed of light in the optical fiber is calculated to be ~ 2.054 x 108 m/s corresponding to a refractive index of n ≈ 1.4606 which is a typical value" https://web.phys.ksu.edu/posters/2009/juma-Adv-Lab-S09.pdf
Is the math-planation of your random fact basically
(thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Hikikomori for correcting the lightspeed in fibre medium from 3e5 to 2e5 !)
- lightspeed is 2e5 km/s ~ 2e2 km/ms, so/
- length (km) / 200 (km)/ms ~ K length (km) / 200 (km)/ms, so
- latency (ms) ~ K' length (km)
Where K is approximately 1.3 (K' is 1/155) and factors in things like:
- non straight line distance
- networking overhead / switching
- both ways / measurement error
Basically?
Within these regions there's a lot of variation from zone to zone, so the methodology matters.
Perhaps if you selected a datacenter, and it switched to a 2-d projection with that datacenter at the center of the map, it would be better?
Or perhaps augment the visualization with a table?
Bonus: select the nearest data center based on the user’s IP :)
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/network-manager/latest/infrastru...
AWS also provides dashboards that shows what regions/services are down, and history tells us those are not to be trusted for precisely the same reasons.
There's some comments here also wondering about the best possible latency for speed of light vs what these measurements are. The problem with this is that c isn't the propagation velocity of information through fiber, it's some velocity well under c and depends on a number of different factors, many of which are unknowable, such as repeater latency and so on. In practice, the best theoretical value is no higher than 70% of c just measuring the velocity of light in a medium as c measures light in a vacuum.
The reason I know is because I worked on a project that required latency to be under 30ms between datacenters, and we had to use eu-west-1 (Ireland) and eu-south-2.
Turns out that latency is closer to 42ms, mainly because there are no undersea cables between Ireland and the continent (they only go to England, then they have to route across England to get to a cable to the content).
At the bottom of the page it says: «Data scraped from CloudPing», with the CloudPing dataset linked through. If you click through to CloudPing, you won't find «eu-south-2» in the dataset.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com
This will show you everything connected to Ireland:
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/country/ireland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti...