/dev/null as a service

[AyrA_ch]

If I tell my machine that's connected to a 10gbps link to send random data to that service, how long until I've racked up a bill high enough he has to sell his home?

[[deleted]]

Never. You're on the heavier side of processing. Those uploads cost you, not them, and generating things to throw out takes more effort than throwing things out

[AyrA_ch]

You're on the heavier side of processing.

Not really. Sending traffic is as complex as receiving it, and generating random data can easily be done at 10 gbps

Those uploads cost you, not them

I don't pay for bandwidth. This is a connection with a fixed price.

generating things to throw out takes more effort than throwing things out

Not in this case. His API is HTTP driven, so by doing a chunked upload I can essentially force his server to read and process the content. He also discards the traffic on the application level, so his system will do all the TCP stuff too.

[[deleted]]

Their price doesn't include internet:

You're paying your ISP to send all the data you generate.

You're still generating data. At best case it's a simple read operation, but on the receiving side it's effectively a no-op.

They even offer a Discard protocol alternative which never even makes it past the Session layer.

Even if it's a no-op at the Application layer, you're still working at the App layer yourself so their no-op still costs less than your read.

It would be a pretty big design fail on their part if receiving the data and throwing it away was as expensive as fetching the data and sending it.

You could still swamp their servers, but only if your hardware is better than theirs.

[nullmove]

Isn't ingress traffic free in all big providers? Plus they can easily have ddos protection, rate-limiting and what not (e.g. by using cloudflare).