> This got me also thinking, would operating some sort of spot market for traffic make sense to AWS?
Probably not, except in exceptional cases. I don't know how AWS manages their networks, but chances are they have a lot of spare capacity most of the time. And likely some major customers with location flexibility.
When I was a #1 customer of a different cloud, they had a fiber cut between one of their buildings and their IX PoP, and lost a sizable amount of capacity until the fiber was repaired. They asked us to move a ton of traffic, and we asked 'why us?' and the answer was basically if we moved that much traffic, none of their other customers needed to move anything, and we had the ability to move traffic quickly (and we had our lower bandwidth core service in the affected buildings that really couldn't move). I don't know how much Amazon retail and Amazon prime streaming use, but it could be significant and is almost certainly easy to move.
Probably not, except in exceptional cases. I don't know how AWS manages their networks, but chances are they have a lot of spare capacity most of the time. And likely some major customers with location flexibility.
When I was a #1 customer of a different cloud, they had a fiber cut between one of their buildings and their IX PoP, and lost a sizable amount of capacity until the fiber was repaired. They asked us to move a ton of traffic, and we asked 'why us?' and the answer was basically if we moved that much traffic, none of their other customers needed to move anything, and we had the ability to move traffic quickly (and we had our lower bandwidth core service in the affected buildings that really couldn't move). I don't know how much Amazon retail and Amazon prime streaming use, but it could be significant and is almost certainly easy to move.