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Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

Mhmm I would have expected the co-located source/destination numbers to be 1, slightly lower, and 2, more consistent between regions.

Ie, I would not have expected eu-central-1/eu-central-1 to be 1.68ms, and us-east-2/us-east-2 is 8.26ms (almost 5x)

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AWS's availability zones are unlike Google Clouds AZs, as they are physically meaningfully distant.

A geological or technical event near one AWS AZ is highly unlikely to also affect the others of that region, unless the event is regional (heh) in scale. For Google Cloud, the AZs are effectively co-located buildings (or at least, Eemshaven has 3 GC AZ DCs at < 1km distance from each other), making even local disruptions reasonably likely to impact availability for the whole region.

Yes, that being said, I would expect those same precautions to be taken in all regions, and thus not give a meaningful difference per region, between regions (if that makes sense).

Different regions have different types of worries. Distance and precautions required to deal with redundancy for an earthquake may not be the same as required for a tornado, or hurricane, or flood, etc. In some cases, I imagine elsewhere in the same large city may suffice. In others, maybe it requires 50-100 miles.

Us-east-1 aws buildings are within couple miles too

us-east-1 is a very special region. All of Amazon.com runs/ran there for a long time. And a lot of global features of AWS itself run there too.

Isn‘t it interesting how less one knows usually about exact specs of the Cloud?

You're correct that some Google Cloud zones are in the same physical building. However, the separate zones are designed with independent power, cooling, and networking. So, failure events usually affect only a single zone.

The chart doesn't show AZ data, which seems like an important piece of this puzzle.

Perhaps OP can answer. The AZ ID[0], as opposed to the name, does identify a specific AZ location, so certainly possible to measure AZ-to-AZ latencies.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-wit...

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