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I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters. These would have relatively high mass and streamlined design, which would allow for radiation shielding

I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters. These would have relatively high mass and streamlined design, which would allow for radiation shielding, and reduce the necessity of boosting orbital trajectory. They would also have very high bandwidth line of sight laser communications. This would allow them to migrate the state of virtual servers to the next satellite over. So applications consisting of a cloud of server processes can incrementally migrate to virtually "hover" at very low altitudes above the earth. Assuming Starlink also works, I suspect the first company to make this work would make an absolute killing.

isostatic 7y ago
> I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters Why? Build on the ground with a fibre, far cheaper and far lower latency.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Can't be served a warrant. Arguably superior physical security. Can have line of sight comms with the entire region, which are both more direct and have faster signal speeds than fiber. For certain global applications, a low orbit cloud consisting of many datacenters has some advantages. The virtual servers could virtually migrate to "hover" wherever they are needed, or to wherever would minimize latency.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    Do you have any idea how orbits work?
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      Do you have any idea how orbits work? Yes. But your reading comprehension is spotty. Look at the cousin comment: The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
  - rladd 7y ago
    That's not how orbits work.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      That's not how orbits work. You're not understanding the proposal. The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
      - rladd 7y ago
        So wait, we're sending entire server states from one satellite to another every few seconds, rather than routing the data to the satellite when needed? Seems like it would be a trade-off that would be worthwhile only for a small number of edge cases where there's a small server size, a fast start-up time, and a huge amount of very local traffic. In which case, put the server on the ground near the traffic? Or alternatively, move just a bit of the data (caches and some processing) around.

isostatic 7y ago

> I would also like to see low orbit shielded datacenters Why? Build on the ground with a fibre, far cheaper and far lower latency.

stcredzero 7y ago
Can't be served a warrant. Arguably superior physical security. Can have line of sight comms with the entire region, which are both more direct and have faster signal speeds than fiber. For certain global applications, a low orbit cloud consisting of many datacenters has some advantages. The virtual servers could virtually migrate to "hover" wherever they are needed, or to wherever would minimize latency.
- isostatic 7y ago
  Do you have any idea how orbits work?
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    Do you have any idea how orbits work? Yes. But your reading comprehension is spotty. Look at the cousin comment: The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
- rladd 7y ago
  That's not how orbits work.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    That's not how orbits work. You're not understanding the proposal. The way the "hovering" would work, is that the entire state of one virtual server would be serialized, then sent via line-of-sight high bandwidth comms to the next satellite to go over the region of interest. This way, the entire application's server cluster could incrementally migrate to remain over one geographic area, but do so at a much lower altitude than geosynchronous orbit.
    - rladd 7y ago
      So wait, we're sending entire server states from one satellite to another every few seconds, rather than routing the data to the satellite when needed? Seems like it would be a trade-off that would be worthwhile only for a small number of edge cases where there's a small server size, a fast start-up time, and a huge amount of very local traffic. In which case, put the server on the ground near the traffic? Or alternatively, move just a bit of the data (caches and some processing) around.