Amazon AWS is 10 times bigger than the next 14 competitors combined. [0] Amazon's unused network capacity is likely far larger than any other single provider's total available capacity, possibly with the exception of Azure.
If it's expensive for Amazon to have multiple Tbps of unused capacity, imagine how expensive it is for any other provider. To match the absolute spare bandwidth of Amazon having only 1/10 extra network capacity, another cloud provider might need to have keep its network utilization at only 5%. Maintaining a network capable of serving over 20x your current utilization "just in case of DDoS" is bloody expensive.
One major difference between Google and AWS is that Google will carry your packets between data centers on its backbone by default. Google will also carry packets as close to the customer as possible, whereas AWS will dump it off as quickly as possible.
So, even between Google Cloud and AWS it's not an apples to apples comparison.
Thanks for that. I knew Google has scary, massive bandwidth but didn't realize it was shared between their internal operations and their cloud platform.
A lot of the time ddos also depends on number of locations, because typically only one customer is attacked, and typically that one customer is only in a few location.
Also, I'm not sure I buy the argument Amazon has small unused capacity in absolute value, relative maybe. They could also have 5% across 23 locations so if your application is distributed it can have even better resiliency.
And Amazon, I guarantee you, doesn't have that much unused network capacity. That would be very, very expensive at their scale.