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Why Amazon's data centers are in spy country (2016)
- oculusthrift 10y agoI'm actually quite suspicious about everything Amazon is doing out there. I was recently contacted about a job at Amazon that they advertised would gain me a government security clearance. The main problem being that I'd have to move to Virginia.
- dsl 10y agoAWS maintains an entire region named GovCloud explicitly to isolate sensitive workloads and meet compliance requirements. The "security clearance" is basically just a background check to make sure you aren't a spy.
- rdtsc 10y agoNot necessarily. I am guessing GovCloud doesn't require a security clearance. Just have to be a US Person. That means a citizen or have a green card. (At least for ITAR purposes that is good enough). If they ask for a security clearance or are willing to sponsor it, it probably has to do with that $600M private AWS instance for the CIA. But yes if you have a clearance here you can pretty much walk out of the building if you don't like your job and walk into the next one and they'll give you one. (That's the joke anyway).
- dsl 10y agoI just assumed if they wanted him to move to VA is was likely for the pending build out of GovCloud east. Edit: I found a map with the C2S region on it, and it does appear to be in the VA/MD area.
- rdtsc 10y agoYeah but he wouldn't need to get clearance to work for GovCloud.
- whorleater 10y ago> That means a citizen or have a green card No, anything remotely close to the US government requires a full citizenship. I got slammed by that when I was in the middle of applications for scientific software companies which did government contracting on the side.
- foob_newman 10y agoWorking on GovCloud requires ITAR which is citizen or "permanent resident" (green card). There are other positions that require a security clearance, but GovCloud does not. GovCloud is open to non-governmental customers who need to meet stricter requirements (it's not solely for government use).
- throwawayish 10y ago> GovCloud is open to non-governmental customers Some excellent naming there ;)
- Rezo 10y agoIt's still pretty apt, the reason the non-government customers are in GovCloud is almost always because their customers are in the government. For example, if you want to sell a service to US government departments, you'll find it much easier to do so if you have a presence in GovCloud yourself.
- rdtsc 10y agoDepends on what you do. Often managers don't even know so they just use "citizen" as rule to be safe. Also worked for the military and we had a variety of citizens, non-citizens, green card holders and non-green card holders. We had to go through silly gymnastics on who can talk about what and work on what depending on their status.
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- late2part 10y ago"You can only obtain AWS GovCloud (US) accounts if you are an individual or entity that qualifies as a U.S. Person under applicable regulations. " http://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/getting-started-sign-up.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/gett... "§ 120.15 U.S. person. U.S. person means a person (as defined in §120.14 of this part) who is a lawful permanent resident as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(20) or who is a protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3). It also means any corporation, business association, partnership, society, trust, or any other entity, organization or group that is incorporated to do business in the United States. It also includes any governmental (federal, state or local) entity. It does not include any foreign person as defined in §120.16 of this part. " http://pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/official_itar/ITAR_Part_120.pdf http://pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/official_...
- discodave 10y agoNo, security clearance relates to this contract that AWS has:https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
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- Johnny555 10y agoThe GovCloud AWS region is located in the Northwestern USA, so it seems more likely that if he was doing GovCloud specific work, they'd have hired him in Seattle. Though I'm sure AWS does lots of work with US government agencies in us-east-1, so it's not surprising that a government clearance might be required for some of it.
- foob_newman 10y agoProduct teams support their services in all regions, meaning if a team is based in Virginia it still supports all the other regions simultaneously.
- ed8c2313b7bb4a8 10y agoGovCloud is indeed in the Pacific Northwest, according to the 2011 announcement from Amazon itself. Specifically, it's in Boardman, Oregon, on a road named after famous explorers. It was their first structure in the area, confirmed by aerial photography and contemporary reporting. Smaller modular backups were active on a different site in Boardman right next to the interstate, and outside Umatilla near the prison. These other sites eventually evolved into the rest of us-east-2. As for us-east-1, it all began in Chantilly in an existing low-rise building you could mistake for rentable office space, then expanded to several different sites between Sterling, Ashburn, and the airport itself, and perhaps surprisingly, to another place where famous battles were fought. Finally, they have a site a bit further away, near where Disney was going to build a theme park. That's where they want to expand more, but first they have to convince the power company to get them a dedicated line, instead of being fed from the same place as the battlefield. Some sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-govcloud-us-region/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-govcloud-us-region/ http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2011/11/amazon_confirms_its_data_cente.html http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2011/11/a... http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2011/10/amazon_turns_on_data_center_in.html http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2011/10/a...
- sargun 10y agoThe AWS "Region" which the super secret stuff runs in isn't plain GovCloud. It's Amazon C2S. It's not talked about much (at all). From my understanding, most people who work on this cloud do not need a clearance but do need heavy background checks. Some people operate directly with the intelligence agencies (and work on their campuses as part of their duties for AWS). These people often handle sensitive data and therefore need clearance. Amazon often hires individuals who are located near intelligence services to ease this.
- p0rkbelly 10y agoWhy is that suspicious? There is an entire website just for jobs that require clearance. www.clearancejobs.com There is plenty of governmental work out there that mandates certain levels of clearance. Even big consulting firms like Booz Allen or Accenture will require it for certain hires.
- walrus01 10y agoThe presence of huge datacenter facilities in NoVA near Dulles greatly predates Amazon AWS/S3 or any significant Amazon presence online, except for its online store. Huge amounts of construction occurred prior to 2002. The fact that there's tons of dark fiber and it's easily trenched in green field type applications there is why it has continued. It reached a certain tipping point that a dozen square km of NoVA became the defactor carrier interconnect point for anything on the US east coast (outside of the NYC/NJ area).
- metaobject 10y agoBut there seems to be a recent surge in data center construction in the area, with something like 7 (?) new DCs being built right now.
- empath75 10y agoYeah I live off of Loudoun parkway and there are three or four of them going up now and 4 on my street built in the last two years.
- walrus01 10y agoYeah, because if you buy circuits into the right places in the same neighborhood you can reach a huge chunk of the internet via settlement free peering. Plus IX costs of course. And IP transit is epically cheap in the Dulles area, sub $0.10/Mbps.
- rdtsc 10y agoPeople like to say it is s mini Silicon Valley here. A lot tech companies have some presence here Oracle, MS, Google, Verisign, AWS, etc. Obviously this is also government contractor land. Then there there are those buildings without any signs but with 3 layers of fences, and every other person seems to work for the "State Department" (cough cough CIA). But I think another reason companies like it here is because of tax structure. I hear it is more advantageous for them than being in DC or Maryland. Other fun thing, apparently if you dig around Tysons Corner you have a high chance of randomly hitting 3-letter agencies' fiber. And then black SUVs come and talk to you in a surprisingly short amount time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002114.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...
- openasocket 10y ago> every other person seems to work for the "State Department" I actually had a professor who specializes in algebraic number theory quit and move to DC, saying only that he was going to "work in Washington." I guess you can't really be subtle, there's not that many jobs out there in algebraic number theory.
- rdtsc 10y agoOld joke from the my University's math department. Q: How do you apply to work for the NSA A: You pick up the phone, call your mother, and ask for an application.
- jlgaddis 10y agoI remember hearing a slight variation... Q: How do you get a job application for the NSA? A: Pick up the phone and ask the dial tone.
- walrus01 10y agoWell, since the NSA is actually in MD, you can be a bit more vague than that if you want to... It's technically not "In Washington" so you're not lying.
- ryanmarsh 10y agoIf you want to know where all the data centers are in N. Virginia just fly into Dulles and look out the window. The approach into Dulles is usually long and low from the west and the data centers are the low large buildings with big generators and lots of chillers outside. There's a fuck ton of them.
- walrus01 10y agoAerial photos and satellite photos are also an easy way to spot 1MW+ sized diesel generators and heat exchangers. I have found a few wall street trading firms' unadvertised disaster recovery sites that way, when combined with other on the ground publicly available info.
- sndean 10y agoI grew up in Dulles (aka Sterling/Ashburn). Another way to go on a tour of data centers is to ride on your bike all along the W&OD trail [0] between Arlington and Leesburg. Lots memories skateboarding around those places, then getting chased out. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington+and+Old+Dominion+Trail,+Virginia/@38.9897225,-77.4121855,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b6383879fde15d:0x387317f4d22ff1c9!8m2!3d38.9897225!4d-77.4099968 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington+and+Old+Dominio...
- gtrubetskoy 10y agoThere is no mystery here. The "spy country" link is more of a coincidence; after all, the Internet was a DARPA project, and Northern Virginia is where a lot of defense and government stuff is. When DARPA Internet was turned over to the public, one of the largest interconnect points was at 8100 Boone Blvd (Tysons Corner), known as MAE East [1]. Once upon a time I had access to it, as did countless other people running small ISPs around the area and renting rack space in that building. But the building (it's actually three buildings, and the MAE gigabit switch [2] was in the basement across the street) was not really suitable for any kind of a data center, though above.net did manage to convert the whole level of a parking garage into one, albeit with very low ceilings. Pretty soon everyone figured out that by Dulles airport rent is way cheaper, you can build from scratch, there is plenty of electricity and water and connectivity is cheap, and AOL was out that way too. That's pretty much the story. Amazon barely existed then. There used to be a nice bookstore nearby called "Computer Literacy Bookshop", which eventually went all online and later got acquired by Amazon or B&N, can't remember... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East [2] http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012,filename=mae-east-in-the-parking-garage.jpg http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012...
- walrus01 10y agoPretty much the same reason why there are a ton of carrier exchange points in certain geographic areas of the SF Bay area. Or why the Westin Building in Seattle and One Wilshire in Los Angeles have become the defacto carrier exchange points/peering locations. Large numbers of ISPs began accretion in certain buildings in the mid to late 1990s and the process has continued through its own inexorable inertia.
- greglindahl 10y agoIIRC when the Internet actually formed there were 7 places that you needed to be at in order to have settlement-free peering. Looking at various not-so-organized Wikipedia articles it appears that I am not recalling the earliest days. I think all of these still exist; MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example. At one point blekko moved into a brand new datacenter in Santa Clara which had only limited fiber connectivity. @ChuckMcM twisted their arm for a free interconnect to MAE-WEST so that we could move over our existing inexpensive transit and interconnect contracts. Everyone's in MAE-WEST.
- foob_newman 10y agoI don't think it has much to do with "spy country". The area just happened to be one of the first to build a co-location/interconnect site where different providers could join their networks. Then, as the article states, "Networks build atop networks" and it grew from there.
- ckozlowski 10y agoThis is a good book to read on it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LG92LYM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LG92LYM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... It's a bit of both. Network providers were encouraged to build in the area to support government requirements lead by defense and intelligence. But that same infrastructure supports commercial. When Equinix built their exchange in the D.C. area to support those customers, it snowballed from there. It also helps that the D.C. area has cheaper electricity than many parts of the country. And a major transmission line serving the east coast runs west of D.C. Fiber + cheap electricity adds up. It's more than just Amazon that's out here. Azure and Rackspace have datacenters out here, as well as a large smattering of colos and smaller providers.
- foob_newman 10y agoI have had that book on my Amazon wishlist since Jan 2016, so I guess it's time to get it!
- bane 10y agoOne of the thing this piece misses in describing the weird banality of Northern Virginia is comparing it to someplace else. I'll compare it to San Francisco. For reference for people not used to the D.C. area, Northern Virginia (NoVA) is about the same size as the San Francisco Bay Area...without the Bay. The major city it's associated with is Washington D.C. instead of San Francisco (two cities of roughly the same size) and the regions have roughly comparable household incomes. However, the GDP of the Oakland-San Jose-San Francisco metro is about twice that of the D.C. metro. Northern Virginia doesn't really have any incorporated large cities to speak of but it's just at the southern end of the Northeast Megalopolis mega-region [1] so it's quite urban in many areas. Notable "cities" might be Tysons Corner, Alexandria (a city without a county), Arlington (a county with a city), Reston, maybe a couple others. Large parts of the area are preserved as National Monuments, National Parks and Battlefields from the Civil War. However, most of it is very very suburb. Despite the image of being , being near the seat of government it also has an amazingly diverse population. The boring suburbs are also punctuated with restaurants from almost every country you can guess, religious groups from JW to Jainism and even local theaters that will play Bollywood to Korean Horror. And I don't mean like a few representative examples, I mean like a dozen competing large supermarkets that deal in goods for Asian customers from a dozen countries, a half dozen for Latin and Hispanic, African restaurants from around the continent, a reasonable Vietnamese-town like area, two (almost three if the third one can ever get established) Korea towns, a couple quasi Chinese areas, a dozen or so up-scale dining and shopping areas. One could easily eat a meal from a different country for every meal of the day for months and not exhaust the region. The diversity is so intense and the population so large the area can support very niche kinds of services, for example, you can find several Indian owned coffee shops that focus on coffee and Indian desserts, or you can go eat Chinese Hotpot, then hop out for a few hours of conversation at a local hookah bar and finish your evening at a Korean spa, then wake up at 2 in the morning and go get all night Salvadorean food. The next day you stop at a Korean bakery for breakfast, work your hangover off on Ethiopian food for lunch before diving into your choice of Persian, Afghan, Lebanese, or Kazakh style kabobs for dinner. It gets kind of ridiculous and knowing how to eat with chopsticks, what to do with injera, roti and how to eat Pho, Sam Gyup Sal and that real Tacos aren't crunchy is basically expected among locals. Ndole, Silpancho or Pupusas for lunch and Thai, American Chinese, Szechuan, Beijing or Taiwanese for Dinner is not untypical. Locals feel weird in less diverse environments and don't understand why they can't eat from the world when they travel. You get all the benefits of suburbia, but very few of the downsides (nightlife could be better). The weather is the worst form of all the seasons: hot, humid summers; cold wet winters; frequently overcast; with a few days of nice spring and a few days of nice autumn with colorful leaves. Because of the huge numbers of migrants, nobody knows how to drive in the winter, skiing sucks and Atlantic water sports are boring. Two major airports, rail links, several ports nearby, a thriving tech industry (mostly serving the government) and a huge stable employer (the government) mean that the economy is remarkably stable in the face of massive economic up/down turns. It's hard to catch a wave up, but it's also hard to find yourself without a job, especially if you work in tech. You can drive for 30 miles in one direction on one road and see almost back-to-back-to-back tech companies. Traffic is easily #1 or #2 in the country with no predictable patterns or ways to estimate transit time, so out of towners expecting back-to-back meetings all over the area are very sad. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
- lostboys67 10y agoIts not surprising that anyone running data centres doesn't advertise when I worked for BT our data centre at staples corner had no external branding. This was for security as DC and Exchanges are CNI targets - ironically the PIRA did blow up the building next door.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoAn incalculable, but very significant, portion of all human knowledge is locked away in secret, nondescript buildings. I've always wonder what would happen if us-east-1 was somehow destroyed. How much would be lost?