perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Michael Smitasin <>]

> Some service providers have language in their user agreements that 
forbid disclosure of observed performance to third parties.

*ponders implications of an R&E-focused VPS initiative* Anyone have an 
unused datacenter or 5?

Michael Smitasin
Principal Network Engineer
LBLnet Services Group
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory


On 4/5/2017 6:41 AM, Mark Feit wrote:
> Eli Dart writes:
>
> It would be interesting to have a conversation with Amazon about expected 
> data transfer performance numbers for different types of AWS instances, using 
> different technologies (HTTP, Globus S3 connector, etc).
>
> Do you think they might be receptive to something like this?
>
> I hate to be the thrower of cold water, but it’s likely to be a very short 
> conversation.
>
> Unlike R&E, which has every reason to share this kind of thing in the 
> interest of furthering research; businesses have every reason to play their cards 
> very close to their chests for competitive advantage.  They also tend to be 
> intentionally vague about performance because the oversubscription-based business 
> model makes it unpredictable.  (Measurement in a rent-a-box environment has a 
> long list of pitfalls and will probably be the subject of something I write in 
> the future because it seems to be of interest to a lot of people.)
>
> There would be no business case for installing dedicated measurement machines 
> because the cost relative to the return wouldn’t be worth it.  They may do 
> this internally, but it’s done as part of their monitoring infrastructure and 
> isn’t going to be available for us to run perfSONAR.   I should also note 
> that Amazon does have a partnership with Rackspace to offer instances on 
> dedicated systems, but they’re (predictably) expensive and probably don’t 
> share EC2’s infrastructure.
>
> One other thing to consider:  Some service providers have language in their 
> user agreements that forbid disclosure of observed performance to third 
> parties.  It would be wise to consult your agreements with Amazon and others 
> before having these discussions in any detail or making rented instances part 
> of a publicly-visible dashboard to avoid running afoul of the terms.
>
> --Mark