Episode Details

About Corey Quinn

Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.

Transcript

Corey: Hello and welcome to our Networking in the Cloud, mini series sponsored by ThousandEyes. That's right. There may be just one of you, but there are a thousand eyes on a more serious note. ThousandEyes has sponsored their cloud performance benchmarking report for 2019 at the end of last year. Talking about what it looks like when you race various cloud providers. They looked at all the big cloud providers and determined what does performance look like from an end user perspective? What does the user experience look like among and between different cloud providers? To get your copy of this report, you can visit snark.cloud/realclouds. Why real clouds? Well, because they raced AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud and Alibaba, all of which are real clouds.

They did not include Oracle Cloud because once again they are real clouds. Check out your copy of the report at snark.cloud/realclouds. It's interesting that that report focuses on the end user experience because as this mini series begins to wind down, we're talking today about the last mile and its impact on what perceived cloud performance looks like. And I will admit that even having given this entire mini series and having a bit of a network engineering background, once upon a time, I still wind up in a fun world of always defaulting to blaming my local crappy ISP.

Now today, my local ISP is amazing. I use Sonic in San Francisco. I get Symmetric Gigabit. It's the exact opposite of Comcast who was my last provider until Sonic came to my neighborhood and it was fun that day because I looked up and down the block and saw no fewer than six Sonic trucks ripping Comcast out by the short and curlies. Which let's not kid ourselves, is something we all wish we could do and I was the happiest boy in town the day I got to do it. Now, the hard part is figuring out that yes, it is in fact a local ISP problem because it isn't always. This is also fortuitous because I spent the last month or so fixing my own local internet situation and today I'd like to tell you a little bit more about that as well as how and why.

Originally when I first moved into my roughly, we'll call it 2,800 square foot house, it's spread across three stories, I wound up getting EEROs, that's E-E-R-O. They're a mesh network set up that was acquired by Amazon after I'd purchased them. These are generation one. The wireless environment in San Francisco is challenging and in certain parts of my house, the reception as a result, wound up being a steaming bowl of horse crap. The big challenge was figuring out that, that's what the problem was. With weird dropouts and handoff issues, it was interesting. This one area that caused immediate improvement was not having these things talk to each other wirelessly as most full mesh systems will do, but instead making sure that they were cabled up appropriately to a switch, the central patch panel and then hooked them in. Now you have to be careful with switches because a lot of stuff won't do anything approaching full throughput because t