I use Resource Monitor to see how programs on my system are behaving. I have my filter set to only show connections being made from flightsimulator.exe
Yet, I never seem to see connections to Microsoft / Azure servers. I’m always making connections to Amazon Web Services and Akamai Technologies. Even for the IP addresses, when I look them up, it tends to be one of these 2 providers.
Isn’t it strange that a Microsoft product that seems to pimp Bing and the power of Azure is using competitor’s server farms? This would be like using Google Maps instead of Bing for the world data.
I’m confused here. Are you guys seeing the same thing?
Akamai is probably sitting in front of the servers for load balancing and protection. As for using competitors servers, it only makes sense to route your customers connections to the fastest available server. If that happens to be a server utilized under a different company, so be it - I don’t expect there to be Azure service connections 24/7 as networking can be a very convoluted task.
Speculation or discussion? Users seem to be reporting stuttering that could be due to server problems but due to alleged failing communication from Asobo, we Beta testers have to guess if that is the problem. LOL
My question is: how would Asobo/MS know if the 3rd party servers provide us with sufficient server capacity?
3, 2, 1, … Flagged / Thank you for your feedback. Thread closed.
The reason it works with Akamai is simple enough. Akamai has been around for decades and has caching servers in LOTS of datacenters across the world. It makes complete business sense for Azure to handoff to Akamai servers in places where it doesn’t make sense to spin up an Azure region.
There’s a lot more cooperation at this level than you’d think. Akamai doesn’t directly compete with Azure - yes, Azure has a CDN business, but it’s really a general purpose cloud, whereas Akamai is ONLY a CDN (simplifying a bit here).
Source: I worked in enterprise tech (including at Microsoft, but not anywhere related to games) for many years. Still working in tech.
Yup, you can IMO assume you will not get an answer from Asobo/MS. But what you can expect on any forum IMO is that you will get replies from some forum members that you should carefully evaluate, for example, by looking at their forum history, by looking for bias or attempts at suppression of opinion by flagging, or opinion support by a few like-minded, etc. That means, for example, don’t let them shut you down. Just laugh off their attempts and persist with your forum participation. It cannot be excluded that you will make a contribution that Asobo/MS will value i the long-term.
I’m sorry I can’t give you an answer to your question. IMHO a fair discussion on this forum on any matter that might negatively affect the standing or reputation of Asobo/MS appears to be hindered by a minority of sim users who claim to be delighted by the sim but nevertheless spend most of the time here making posts that are off-topic or do not contribute to the thread issue instead of enjoying their flying.
I’m pretty sure that the Amazon server is where the real time METAR data for Live Weather comes from. That data was added to the LiveWeather ecosystem around late November, and that is when that Amazon server first appeared in the list of IP connections that MSFS establishes when it runs. I think that Microsoft contracted with a data provider other than MeteoBlue for the real time METARS, and that provider happens to be hosted on an Amazon AWS server.
If you do a “Whois” lookup on the IP addresses that do not resolve to URLs in Resource Monitor, you will find that they are all owned by Microsoft, and are all associated with Azure. These are known as “Direct IPs” and are not registered in the Internet domain name system.
By far the bulk of the high data rate, high bandwidth streamed scenery data comes from those Azure IPs, as does LiveWeather. (With the exception of the METARS).
I suspect that Akamai is involved with the multiplayer sub system among other things, and are possibly hosting the various parts of MSFS that are “cloud based”, like user settings, controller profiles, the logbook etc. They are probably also involved in the Marketplace, as well as recording user performance metrics - i.e. who is logged on, and for how long etc.
If you want to see more detail as to exactly how much data is flowing to and from each IP associated with MSFS, I would recommend CurrPorts instead of the Resource Monitor.
The Amazon traffic is persistent even when not using live weather and with other data services off.
My guess would be rented compute capacity because of heavier than expected load across all MS systems including those used for office productivity given so many working remotely.
