AWS mumbles about its cost-busting networking tech when it should be shouting

Last month I sat in a networking lab with AWS VP of Global Network Engineering Matt Rehder and cracked a joke about cage nuts cutting your hands to ribbons.

I wasn't prepared for the blank stare I got in response, but I really should have been.

Mind you, not because the joke wasn't funny (my jokes are hilarious), but rather because the world the joke was referencing no longer exists for them.

Racks show up as assembled units, and apparently nobody screws hardware into anything in an AWS datacenter facility these days.

It was a peek behind a curtain into a world that powers everything we do in cloud, but that remarkably few of us know exists.

My Reg colleague Thomas Claburn toured the lab previously and gave us a deep dive into AWS's paper on this.

In summary, "a flat, single-tier network wired in a deliberately near-random pattern leads to a way more resilient network that costs far less to run" and now you're up to speed.

The part that I felt didn't get enough attention (and is why I invited myself to tour an AWS facility, much to AWS's surprise) is the economic part and how it impacts AWS customers.

In short, their new networking approach can be up to 40 percent more energy efficient, and it's the default for most new datacenter builds (and dear reader, they are building a lot of those these days), and it's been completely invisible both inside and outside of the walls of the world's largest bookstore.

The savings and cost efficiencies are real — so where do they go? Cost efficiencies abound Seventeen years ago, Amazon SVP James Hamilton got on stage and pointed out [PDF] that network vendors ran businesses whose margins resembled those of mainframe vendors, who themselves in turn resembled starving pigs at a trough (colorful metaphor mine, but also... not wrong).

His big issue with this distilled down to "they're in my way," and he plus his team set out to do something about it.

It turns out that "what they did about it" was nothing less than rebuilding the entire networking stack themselves atop commodity hardware.

This brings us to a few years ago.

Their networking cost efficiencies were already far lower than they would have been running atop traditional networking vendors, and then their Resilient Network Graph shufflebox play took another axe to the cost of networking.