Please explain for us dumb sales guys the distinction between flow and non-flow. My question is the fundamental architecture of these clouds. We all know that Amazon is buying dark fiber and building a network based on lighting 100 and 10 gig waves on IRU and titled fiber. Same for Microsoft (I sold them in a past life some waves) and other large players.

But there appear to be quite a few cloud players that rely heavily on Layer 3 purchased from Level3 (CenturyLink) and other members of the august Tier 1 club. And many CDN players are really transit + real estate operations as was Akamai until recently.

It seems the threshold for moving from purchased transit plus peering to a Layer 1 and 2 network has risen over time. Many former Tier 2 ISPs pretty much gutted their private line networks as transit prices continued inexorable declines.

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> on behalf of Glen Kent <glen.kent@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 9, 2020 11:02 AM
To: nanog@nanog.org <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Flow based architecture in data centers(more specifically Telco Clouds)

Hi,

Are most of the Telco Cloud deployments envisioned to be modeled on a flow based or a non flow based architecture? I am presuming that for deeper insights into the traffic one would need a flow based architecture, but that can have scale issues (# of flows, flow setup rates, etc) and was hence checking.

Thanks, Glen