Understanding internet challenges
Any device that wants to use resources in the cloud must have a connection to the internet. This is sometimes done over country-specific sovereign networks for sensitive government-related workloads, but most of the time, the connections are done over the public internet. This is far more cost-effective than building a bespoke global network of your own, but the downside is that you don’t get to engineer the internet.
On the internet, once your traffic goes to your ISP, you trust them and all of the other systems between them and your destination to get your traffic where it is going. This is by design. It works out fine – most of the time. Your traffic may take a less-than-ideal path along the way, increasing its latency. Or perhaps, while crossing a dozen devices to get where it’s going, one packet out of a thousand is lost and has to be retransmitted.
The impact of latency and packet loss
One in a thousand (0.1%) packet...
