5 ms·
For a global company, Facebook has a surprising uneven distribution of data centers: - Continental US: 14 operating or under construction - Europe: 3 (all
by mjs 5y ago
For a global company, Facebook has a surprising uneven distribution of data centers:
- Continental US: 14 operating or under construction
- Europe: 3 (all operating)
- Everywhere else: 1 (Singapore, under construction)
https://datacenters.fb.com https://datacenters.fb.com
- devoutsalsa 5y agoSingapore real estate is so sparse, I'm surprised they even have room for a datacenter of any notable size.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI wonder if it might be because US datacenters are older and were not built to the same scales as newer datacenters. I can also imagine that the local datacenters are just the equivalent of 'last mile', serving only that which needs to be handled directly, and data is passed asynchronously to the US for larger scale processing and analysis. Makes more sense if they have better (or cheaper) datacenter personnel in the US, or if things like equipment, electricity are cheaper over there.
- vasco 5y agoFor last mile they for sure have agreements with ISPs worldwide for collocated boxes similar to Netflix. These should just be hardcore compute.
- mrweasel 5y agoAll three datacenters in Europe is also in Northern Europe and not exactly close to major internet exchanges.
- donkey-hotei 5y agoThis is mostly for regulatory reasons.
- fmajid 5y agoSingapore has very good connectivity for Asia, specially to India, FB's largest market, to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
- fmajid 5y agoThey were also surprisingly late at building their own datacenters for a company of their size, and ran in colo facilities like 200 Paul Avenue in San Francisco for a very long time.