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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm, they say only 10Tbps capacity, but they serve 10% of the internet's HTTP traffic? That doesn't seem right.

Only? 10 Tbps is HUGE capacity. Biggest IX (Internet Exchange) which is AMS-IX have 5 Tbps at peak. Whole internet traffic in 2016 was around 160 Tbps. So it seems right.

disclaimer: I work for a CDN, but am not representing them with this comment

Right, but this is talking about GLOBAL capacity, not at a single datacenter. The CDN I work for has over 49tbps, and we wouldn't claim to be doing 10% of all HTTP traffic:

https://images.verizondigitalmedia.com/2015/12/VDMS_NetworkM...

Plus, capacity is always going to be greater than actual throughput, both for reliability reasons and traffic patterns (i.e. you need enough capacity for your peak traffic in a datacenter, not the average)

I really doubt the 10% claim.

Of course capacity is always greater, average twice greater as that kind of deals you are taking from T1 providers. But depends how much commitment you have, what kind of deals and traffic patterns you are using. CF has 10 Tbps capacity but probably a lot less throughput, they need high capacity because they are DDOSed a lot.

I wasn't taking those numbers from nowhere. Read this:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-p...

I think people are misinterpreting what they claim, It's not about 10% of internet throughput of HTTP traffic, it's about 10% of all HTTP requests.

I read it as 120 datacenters, each with 10Tbps capacity

Yeah, that isn’t possible.

The "10%" is always going to be a metric of something. If you count bytes in the internet, to some approximation it's 100% netflix + youtube (with some error :P).

Here, the metric probably means "unique domain names" used on the internet.

The slide says 10% requests. http[s] requests that is, not packets.

And where are they getting the total requests on the internet number from?

Exactly. Cloudflare throws these unsubstantiated numbers around all the time. It's just marketing puffery.

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