4 ms·

Building datacenters and is hard. So this is an opportunity for cloud providers. 1. Imagine if Amazon starts building datacenters for others as a service 2. P

Building datacenters and is hard. So this is an opportunity for cloud providers. 1. Imagine if Amazon starts building datacenters for others as a service 2. People starts leasing or renting entire DCs built by Amazon, Google etc. Maintenance is done by these cloud providers. Do we have these already?

traceroute66 5y ago
> 1. Imagine if Amazon starts building datacenters for others as a service Just as an FYI, those fancy datacentres you see on Amazon/Google/Microsoft marketing videos are really the exception rather than the rule. You will find the majority of cloud servers in exactly the same third-party datacentres that everyone else uses. Why ? Because only the US and perhaps one or two other countries in the world has the spare land for a cloud operator to dump a massive datacentre campus on. Most other countries don't. Or if they do, its either protected land (greenbelt etc.) or its uninhabitable (e.g. Australian Outback).
- rjvs 5y ago
  The observation in the first half of your comment seems sound but your explanation doesn't make sense. There's rather a lot of land in the world outside of the US that could have a datacenter built on it. There's also a lot of Australia that's uninhabited but not uninhabitable.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    I oversimplified a bit, by "land" I also meant associated infrastructure, which includes for example access to electricity. In most countries, building out new high-voltage infrastructure to where it does not exist is both financially expensive and technically painful (planning permission etc). Same for pulling fibre runs to the middle of nowhere. No doubt other things like local laws, tax rebates and whatnot also come into play as well. You may seek to argue that there are a small number of third-party datacentre sites where the cloud operator is the sole tenant of the building. But this again is not the same thing as the cloud operator building their own. They get the option to up sticks and leave at the end of their contract. They also don't have any responsibility over facilities management etc. At most sites, the cloud operator simply has whole or part of a floor (or floors in larger buildings), the rest of the building is occupied by third-party customers.
donavanm 5y ago
Your order of operations is inverted. The existing data center providers have been doing this for a few decades. Equinox, Dell, and friends are the ones who do the build out, management, etc. If youre big enough theyll also build to suite, though at that size you probably have a lot of in house expertise as well. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc are the alternative to dealing with dedicated physical infrastructure and financing. Things like AWS Outpost are there to bridge the gap for companies/workloads that dont fit existing public cloud offerings.

traceroute66 5y ago

> 1. Imagine if Amazon starts building datacenters for others as a service Just as an FYI, those fancy datacentres you see on Amazon/Google/Microsoft marketing videos are really the exception rather than the rule. You will find the majority of cloud servers in exactly the same third-party datacentres that everyone else uses. Why ? Because only the US and perhaps one or two other countries in the world has the spare land for a cloud operator to dump a massive datacentre campus on. Most other countries don't. Or if they do, its either protected land (greenbelt etc.) or its uninhabitable (e.g. Australian Outback).

rjvs 5y ago
The observation in the first half of your comment seems sound but your explanation doesn't make sense. There's rather a lot of land in the world outside of the US that could have a datacenter built on it. There's also a lot of Australia that's uninhabited but not uninhabitable.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  I oversimplified a bit, by "land" I also meant associated infrastructure, which includes for example access to electricity. In most countries, building out new high-voltage infrastructure to where it does not exist is both financially expensive and technically painful (planning permission etc). Same for pulling fibre runs to the middle of nowhere. No doubt other things like local laws, tax rebates and whatnot also come into play as well. You may seek to argue that there are a small number of third-party datacentre sites where the cloud operator is the sole tenant of the building. But this again is not the same thing as the cloud operator building their own. They get the option to up sticks and leave at the end of their contract. They also don't have any responsibility over facilities management etc. At most sites, the cloud operator simply has whole or part of a floor (or floors in larger buildings), the rest of the building is occupied by third-party customers.

donavanm 5y ago

Your order of operations is inverted. The existing data center providers have been doing this for a few decades. Equinox, Dell, and friends are the ones who do the build out, management, etc. If youre big enough theyll also build to suite, though at that size you probably have a lot of in house expertise as well. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc are the alternative to dealing with dedicated physical infrastructure and financing. Things like AWS Outpost are there to bridge the gap for companies/workloads that dont fit existing public cloud offerings.