8 ms·

DigitalOcean Region Information

129 points by mtmail 4y ago

giuliomagnifico 4y ago
Interesting, I’m using it on my VPS for my blog and self-hosted analytics. For $12/months I have all and the service is very good! Yesterday my blog was on the Front Page here on Hacker News (about 13k visits in 4/5h) and the base VPS have held up. Obviously both my two VPS are located in EU (Frankfurt) since I’m Italian and I appreciate the GDPR.
- parchley 4y ago
  You might want to read up on the Schrems II (2) case regarding the GDPR and a US company.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    What world are we in where a guy hosting a blog needs to read about GDPR.
    - dtx1 4y ago
      A world where that person might want to track users or sell privacy intrusive advertisments on their blog.
      - Spivak 4y ago
        I think realistically for a single person blog if you don’t reside in the EU you can just ignore the GPDR. What are they gonna do, sue you?
        bombcar 4y ago
        Even if you ignore the GDPR because it doesn’t apply to you it might be nice to know the company you’re buying hosting from has to comply with it.
        sofixa 4y ago
        OP is Italian, so that's not an option. And even if you don't reside in the EU, you can reasonably believe in privacy and abide by the GDPR.
      - calvinmorrison 4y ago
        This is akin to me, at least to walking into a bar and being upset there are requirements for shoes in shirt. Nobody is forcing you on my website
        dtx1 4y ago
        No its akin to opening a bar without a sign on the outside informing you that your every word and look will be monitored, analysed and shared with big companies. But that's the great thing about GDPR. It's our rights, they apply wether you like it or not.
        calvinmorrison 4y ago
        > they apply wether you like it or not. The EU has ruled, now let them enforce it!
    - pavlov 4y ago
      It's a bit like in the 1960s and '70s when musicians regularly ended up in serious tax debt because they genuinely didn't realize that they should file proper returns. "I'm just a guy who shows up, they hand me some cash, and then I go up on stage and play my guitar. Why do I need to read up on accounting?" Some software developers are in that state of naïveté about the data they collect about their users. Even if it's just a blog, it may be collecting and storing data about readers in many different ways: ads, tracking pixels, comment logins, etc.
      - 1-6 4y ago
        On a grand scheme, it’s also naive to think that GDPR is going to protect end-users. It’s a good attempt but really just a ‘badge’ that websites put on and a nuisance for mobile users.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    Yes, but this largely due to the US CLOUD act [0], and in my opinion, rightfully so. The US needs to get their privacy shit together. Now, is it realistic that it will be illegal for EU providers to use services that are owned by US companies? Very unlikely that this will be the precedent (yes, I know, there are cases where some courts deemed Google Analytics and Google Fonts illegal). However, I would personally also feel more comfortable using services from countries where the government can't subpeona all data at will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
moondev 4y ago
Interesting, so this indicates digitalocean doesn't operate their own datacenters, but is a tenant in each location. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I assume AWS, GCP and Azure actually operate their own? What other cloud providers truly operate their own datacenters?
- heipei 4y ago
  I believe AWS is also using Equinix in some locations.
- EwanToo 4y ago
  The major providers use buildings owned by Equinix and others where they need to. Check out Amazon Atlas on wikileaks for some more information https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/document/ https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/document/
  - hhw 4y ago
    Equinix doesn't own many of the buildings they have facilities in. Aside from Dallas Infomart, I don't really know of any where they do, but I do know many buildings they have facilities in that they don't own. Digital Realty much more commonly owns carrier hotel buildings.
- exabrial 4y ago
  Its pretty common knowledge, they talk about it on their blog too. We’re very happy with DO; Support is very easy to reach, prices are reasonable, downtime has been acceptable for the price. I don’t really see operating your own data center as a GOOD thing. These professional data center providers serve 911 and financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat pictures. The later considers their consumers cattle for the slaughter, while these professional colo providers don’t have that conflict of interest.
  - remus 4y ago
    > These professional data center providers serve 911 and financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat pictures. The later considers their consumers cattle for the slaughter, while these professional colo providers don’t have that conflict of interest. It's kinda silly to suggest nothing important runs on aws/gcp, there's plenty of huge businesses running on them, with equally large legal departments ready to string amazon/google up by the balls if they breach the terms of their contracts around SLAs etc.
paulgb 4y ago
NYC2 is the Google NYC HQ (although Google bought the building, there are still some non-Google tenants)
- CPLX 4y ago
  This may be common knowledge but the building, 111 8th Avenue, has a very interesting history as a telecom center that well predates Google. I remember going to lots of fashionable dotcom parties in offices there in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The story at the time was that it was the most redundantly connected building in the city.
- amarshall 4y ago
  And NYC1 and NYC3 are in NJ, perhaps unsurprisingly.
nik736 4y ago
PeeringDB lists all facilities where DO is located (and some more information): https://www.peeringdb.com/net/6494 https://www.peeringdb.com/net/6494
- mrsimonbennett 4y ago
  That shows you where they are doing peering for example Equinix SG1 - Singapore and Equinix SG2 - Singapore. But DigitalOcean only have one DC in singapore
i_have_to_speak 4y ago
> BLR1 - NTT Communications Mumbai DC6 Uh, pretty sure the Bangalore data center is not in Mumbai.
- nik736 4y ago
  They are located here: https://www.netmagicsolutions.com/data-center/bengaluru/bengaluru-dc2 https://www.netmagicsolutions.com/data-center/bengaluru/beng...
- mrsimonbennett 4y ago
  Thanks I will look into it and update it :)
mjwhansen 4y ago
innnnteresting
Hamuko 4y ago
Can someone explain the rationale behind the location of data centers like SFO2? My understanding has been that real estate in cities, and especially in San Francisco, is limited and thus expensive. If someone tasked me with building a data center, I'd probably start by looking at Google Maps and looking for the nearest big, open field on the outskirts of a city.
- quercusa 4y ago
  There's great value in being close to interconnect points instead of needing to pull fiber from your field.
- michaelt 4y ago
  1. You want to be somewhere you can get multiple high-speed fibre hook ups, and reliable power. 2. Office buildings often have some lower-quality space (e.g. areas with no windows) so you don't have to use super-premium office space. 3. Server racks are extremely dense, so they can make a lot of revenue per square foot compared to a lot of land uses. Good luck running a yoga studio that makes more revenue per square foot. Of course there are disadvantages to city data centres - limited room to expand, and nobody's going to offer you subsidy for "creating jobs".
- kelp 4y ago
  Others have already mentioned that the connectivity in these places is really good, and that's often why you go there. The other reason is you have employees there who can go fix things when they break. In the early days of Square we had everything in a single datacenter in Mountain View and our office was in San Francisco. There were times when something broke in a bad enough way that someone had to drive to the datacenter. It was a while before we built the scale and redundancy to put a facility on the east cost, or in places where we didn't often go. But you're right, per square foot it's often quite expensive. At a certain scale you still buy space in the city for connectivity, but then you buy IP transit, or even dark fiber, to connect to a cheaper and larger facility. That could be in the same region, or it might be out in some farmland with cheap power and good tax incentives. We've seen lots of datacenters built in Washington and Oregon because the electricity is famously cheap hydroelectric. Like $0.02 - $0.03 per kWh. Last I looked a few (5-7?) years ago, industrial power in the Bay Area was closer to $0.10 per kWh and in Ashburn VA it was $0.08.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
This was a fun article, does anyone know where the AWS facilities are? One of the best perks of working at Tumblr was once a month they had a data center tour for employees, you got to go to NJ for a day to see the facility, all of the power equipment, cooling, network equipment, and the servers themselves. Really awesome and eye opening. Pictures don’t really convey the size of these places.
- mrsimonbennett 4y ago
  Wikileaks released them in 2018 https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wikileaks-publishes-list-aws-data-center-locations-colo-providers/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wikileaks-publish... Seems the URL is down however https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/ https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/
  - nixgeek 4y ago
    Amazon has also expanded massively since 2018 and the additions are going to be equally secret in location terms, probably.
- fayalargeau 4y ago
  that is honestly one of the cooler perks i've heard of
- electroly 4y ago
  Aside from the WikiLeaks mentioned by another poster, if you pull up your favorite AWS Region's city in Google Maps satellite view, you'll find the AWS facilities. It's the two or more long, narrow, white buildings with the roof entirely covered in AC units, generators in the parking lot, and a transmission switching station next to it. You'll find several clusters across the city; those are the availability zones. They'll have nondescript code names whereas all the other companies with data centers in the area have the company name labeled. For example, here's an AWS facility in us-east-1. Pairs of narrow white buildings, ACs on top, generators in parking lot, switching station next door, nondescript name: looks like an AWS data center to me. (Thanks to the WikiLeaks doc I happen to know for sure this really is AWS, but you can tell just from the satellite.) https://www.google.com/maps/@39.0271558,-77.4541392,698m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.0271558,-77.4541392,698m/dat... If you have the WikiLeaks document you can just google the "IAD50" type codes and generally find them, but that's no fun.
kkielhofner 4y ago
In terms of the cloud providers other than the big three/four (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle) most of your Digital Oceans, Linodes (perhaps pre-Akamai?), etc of the world are almost all certainly colocated. As others have noted the "big ones" typically operate with a blend - green field physical construction for the big and dense facilities combined with floors/cages/etc in colocation facilities for areas around the world with lower hardware requirements. Colocation facilities are interesting (I've been in a lot of them) and they generally (physically) fall in two buckets: 1) Repurposing of old telecom (and even telegraph!) buildings. CoreSite (a colocation provider) has a few floors (last I looked) in The Telegraph Building in Chicago[0]. If you look at the pictures of the exterior of the building it still says Western Union on the side! There are some interesting aspects of these - most of them are located in downtown areas. If you start looking around in major cities you will start to notice gigantic nondescript buildings with minimal signage, almost no foot traffic, and almost no (if any) windows[1]. If they have any signage at all it will typically be "Something Bell", Western Union, AT&T, etc. These facilities are interesting for a variety of reasons. Because they are repurposed telegraph and telecom buildings going back to the days of mechanical telecom switching[2] and DC battery banks they have floor load ratings that are just incredible. Something like 20x or whatever of a typical high-rise. Downside of these facilities is that on a square footage basis they typically can't support the cooling (and often electrical) requirements of modern compute equipment which is much more dense than the extremely heavy but relatively cool/low power mechanical switches and other equipment from decades ago. If you look at the picture of the Telegraph Building you will notice it's literally right next to the Chicago Stock Exchange. Needless to say these facilities are really popular for HFT stuff. 2) Purpose built facilities. These are typically located near population centers (for access to peering and other fiber) but out of downtown areas. Examples here are CH7 and CH3 from Equinix[3]. These are still close enough to major peering points and fiber distribution so access and latency isn't terrible but being in more "suburban" areas. Here they have more space to build, real estate is cheaper, and interestingly since 9/11 there has been a movement of sorts to move major hosting facilities outside of densely populated areas/potential terrorist targets. Then for your Google, Facebook, NSA, etc of the world they can build in fairly remote (rural) areas where they have essentially unlimited space and significantly higher security[4]. The kind of thing where law enforcement and private security can setup perimeters where if you get anywhere near the actual hosting facility you better have a reason to be there - as opposed to a downtown facility where thousands of people walk and drive by everyday without ever knowing it's there. [0] - http://wikimapia.org/30789188/Telegraph-Building-CoreSite-Data-Center http://wikimapia.org/30789188/Telegraph-Building-CoreSite-Da... [1] - https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/nsa-using-att-data-center-in-hells-kitchen-for-spy-program/ https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/nsa-using-att-data-center-in-h... [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI [3] - https://www.equinix.com/data-centers/americas-colocation/united-states-colocation/chicago-data-centers https://www.equinix.com/data-centers/americas-colocation/uni... [4] - https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/ https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
deltalima25 4y ago
You'd also be surprised to the extent at which it's possible to have datacentres within datacentres. Separate data rooms, or floors within the building can have different power, UPS, HVAC specifications (i.e. to a customer's requirements). Often, a datacenter provider might sign a over a proportion of the space to a large provider, and they essentially become an anchor tenant for the facility. The anchor tenant may even be involved during the build out phase to negotiate the spec etc.
speedgoose 4y ago
I was wondering where were the datacenters for Azure and GCP in my area, but I understood that they are simply using collocation in existing datacenters.
- hohl 4y ago
  Yes and no. They don't use the kind of co-location services you might be thinking about. Co-location targets the corporate world. Corporate world loves it to just hand off the servers and have it run for them. But if you go to a company such as Interxion/Digital Realities, they will just send you away (or more specifically, send you to one of their tenants that offers co-location services), because they are primarily real estate companies. They rent out empty rooms designed to be used for servers and even office space on their campuses. These are normal lease agreements and their purpose is that you put your own staff and infrastructure there. And that's what most mid-sized to large cloud providers actually use. They wouldn't even have the employees to touch servers or network equipment. What they take care of is ensuring that the AC is working, that the shared Diesel aggregates are ready in case of a power outage and that there is security personal patrolling the campus, but they won't enter rooms rented out to customers just like you wouldn't expect your landlord to go into your flat. (Equinix is a bit special on that point, since they offer both. You can get co-location too through Equinix, but it's probably not what AWS, GCP or Azure is using.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kelp 4y ago
This actually surprises me quite a bit. There are a lot of very expensive facilities on this list. Ones that I would not want to put much equipment in if I was at the scale I presume Digital Ocean is at. But maybe it's a factor of organic growth and starting each region small, then having to grow into it. You can often get space for like 1/3rd the cost of Equinix but with a lot less services and maybe less quality. Equinix makes a very nice datacenter but you sure do pay for it. If I were building a CDN or an edge compute product like Fly.io or Render, I'd certainly have a facility list that looked like this, because I'm charging a bit of a premium for excellent connectivity to population centers. Though I'd do some kind of managed hosting first until I had the scale to even get into collocation. But for a bulk cloud provider I'd try to only use these facilities for things like network POPs, DNS services, CDN, etc. Then lease fiber to another facility that was a lot cheaper for the bulk of my compute. But that does take a certain threshold of scale to get there, and a longish planning horizon to make it happen unless you're growing at insane rates.

129 points by mtmail 4y ago

Interesting, I’m using it on my VPS for my blog and self-hosted analytics. For $12/months I have all and the service is very good! Yesterday my blog was on the Front Page here on Hacker News (about 13k visits in 4/5h) and the base VPS have held up. Obviously both my two VPS are located in EU (Frankfurt) since I’m Italian and I appreciate the GDPR.

parchley 4y ago
You might want to read up on the Schrems II (2) case regarding the GDPR and a US company.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  What world are we in where a guy hosting a blog needs to read about GDPR.
  - dtx1 4y ago
    A world where that person might want to track users or sell privacy intrusive advertisments on their blog.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      I think realistically for a single person blog if you don’t reside in the EU you can just ignore the GPDR. What are they gonna do, sue you?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Even if you ignore the GDPR because it doesn’t apply to you it might be nice to know the company you’re buying hosting from has to comply with it.
      - sofixa 4y ago
        OP is Italian, so that's not an option. And even if you don't reside in the EU, you can reasonably believe in privacy and abide by the GDPR.
    - calvinmorrison 4y ago
      This is akin to me, at least to walking into a bar and being upset there are requirements for shoes in shirt. Nobody is forcing you on my website
      - dtx1 4y ago
        No its akin to opening a bar without a sign on the outside informing you that your every word and look will be monitored, analysed and shared with big companies. But that's the great thing about GDPR. It's our rights, they apply wether you like it or not.
        calvinmorrison 4y ago
        > they apply wether you like it or not. The EU has ruled, now let them enforce it!
  - pavlov 4y ago
    It's a bit like in the 1960s and '70s when musicians regularly ended up in serious tax debt because they genuinely didn't realize that they should file proper returns. "I'm just a guy who shows up, they hand me some cash, and then I go up on stage and play my guitar. Why do I need to read up on accounting?" Some software developers are in that state of naïveté about the data they collect about their users. Even if it's just a blog, it may be collecting and storing data about readers in many different ways: ads, tracking pixels, comment logins, etc.
    - 1-6 4y ago
      On a grand scheme, it’s also naive to think that GDPR is going to protect end-users. It’s a good attempt but really just a ‘badge’ that websites put on and a nuisance for mobile users.
- shafyy 4y ago
  Yes, but this largely due to the US CLOUD act [0], and in my opinion, rightfully so. The US needs to get their privacy shit together. Now, is it realistic that it will be illegal for EU providers to use services that are owned by US companies? Very unlikely that this will be the precedent (yes, I know, there are cases where some courts deemed Google Analytics and Google Fonts illegal). However, I would personally also feel more comfortable using services from countries where the government can't subpeona all data at will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

moondev 4y ago

Interesting, so this indicates digitalocean doesn't operate their own datacenters, but is a tenant in each location. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I assume AWS, GCP and Azure actually operate their own? What other cloud providers truly operate their own datacenters?

heipei 4y ago
I believe AWS is also using Equinix in some locations.
EwanToo 4y ago
The major providers use buildings owned by Equinix and others where they need to. Check out Amazon Atlas on wikileaks for some more information https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/document/ https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/document/
- hhw 4y ago
  Equinix doesn't own many of the buildings they have facilities in. Aside from Dallas Infomart, I don't really know of any where they do, but I do know many buildings they have facilities in that they don't own. Digital Realty much more commonly owns carrier hotel buildings.
exabrial 4y ago
Its pretty common knowledge, they talk about it on their blog too. We’re very happy with DO; Support is very easy to reach, prices are reasonable, downtime has been acceptable for the price. I don’t really see operating your own data center as a GOOD thing. These professional data center providers serve 911 and financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat pictures. The later considers their consumers cattle for the slaughter, while these professional colo providers don’t have that conflict of interest.
- remus 4y ago
  > These professional data center providers serve 911 and financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat pictures. The later considers their consumers cattle for the slaughter, while these professional colo providers don’t have that conflict of interest. It's kinda silly to suggest nothing important runs on aws/gcp, there's plenty of huge businesses running on them, with equally large legal departments ready to string amazon/google up by the balls if they breach the terms of their contracts around SLAs etc.

paulgb 4y ago

NYC2 is the Google NYC HQ (although Google bought the building, there are still some non-Google tenants)

CPLX 4y ago
This may be common knowledge but the building, 111 8th Avenue, has a very interesting history as a telecom center that well predates Google. I remember going to lots of fashionable dotcom parties in offices there in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The story at the time was that it was the most redundantly connected building in the city.
amarshall 4y ago
And NYC1 and NYC3 are in NJ, perhaps unsurprisingly.

nik736 4y ago

PeeringDB lists all facilities where DO is located (and some more information): https://www.peeringdb.com/net/6494 https://www.peeringdb.com/net/6494

mrsimonbennett 4y ago
That shows you where they are doing peering for example Equinix SG1 - Singapore and Equinix SG2 - Singapore. But DigitalOcean only have one DC in singapore

i_have_to_speak 4y ago

> BLR1 - NTT Communications Mumbai DC6 Uh, pretty sure the Bangalore data center is not in Mumbai.

nik736 4y ago
They are located here: https://www.netmagicsolutions.com/data-center/bengaluru/bengaluru-dc2 https://www.netmagicsolutions.com/data-center/bengaluru/beng...
mrsimonbennett 4y ago
Thanks I will look into it and update it :)

mjwhansen 4y ago

innnnteresting

Hamuko 4y ago

Can someone explain the rationale behind the location of data centers like SFO2? My understanding has been that real estate in cities, and especially in San Francisco, is limited and thus expensive. If someone tasked me with building a data center, I'd probably start by looking at Google Maps and looking for the nearest big, open field on the outskirts of a city.

quercusa 4y ago
There's great value in being close to interconnect points instead of needing to pull fiber from your field.
michaelt 4y ago
1. You want to be somewhere you can get multiple high-speed fibre hook ups, and reliable power. 2. Office buildings often have some lower-quality space (e.g. areas with no windows) so you don't have to use super-premium office space. 3. Server racks are extremely dense, so they can make a lot of revenue per square foot compared to a lot of land uses. Good luck running a yoga studio that makes more revenue per square foot. Of course there are disadvantages to city data centres - limited room to expand, and nobody's going to offer you subsidy for "creating jobs".
kelp 4y ago
Others have already mentioned that the connectivity in these places is really good, and that's often why you go there. The other reason is you have employees there who can go fix things when they break. In the early days of Square we had everything in a single datacenter in Mountain View and our office was in San Francisco. There were times when something broke in a bad enough way that someone had to drive to the datacenter. It was a while before we built the scale and redundancy to put a facility on the east cost, or in places where we didn't often go. But you're right, per square foot it's often quite expensive. At a certain scale you still buy space in the city for connectivity, but then you buy IP transit, or even dark fiber, to connect to a cheaper and larger facility. That could be in the same region, or it might be out in some farmland with cheap power and good tax incentives. We've seen lots of datacenters built in Washington and Oregon because the electricity is famously cheap hydroelectric. Like $0.02 - $0.03 per kWh. Last I looked a few (5-7?) years ago, industrial power in the Bay Area was closer to $0.10 per kWh and in Ashburn VA it was $0.08.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

This was a fun article, does anyone know where the AWS facilities are? One of the best perks of working at Tumblr was once a month they had a data center tour for employees, you got to go to NJ for a day to see the facility, all of the power equipment, cooling, network equipment, and the servers themselves. Really awesome and eye opening. Pictures don’t really convey the size of these places.

mrsimonbennett 4y ago
Wikileaks released them in 2018 https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wikileaks-publishes-list-aws-data-center-locations-colo-providers/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wikileaks-publish... Seems the URL is down however https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/ https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/
- nixgeek 4y ago
  Amazon has also expanded massively since 2018 and the additions are going to be equally secret in location terms, probably.
fayalargeau 4y ago
that is honestly one of the cooler perks i've heard of
electroly 4y ago
Aside from the WikiLeaks mentioned by another poster, if you pull up your favorite AWS Region's city in Google Maps satellite view, you'll find the AWS facilities. It's the two or more long, narrow, white buildings with the roof entirely covered in AC units, generators in the parking lot, and a transmission switching station next to it. You'll find several clusters across the city; those are the availability zones. They'll have nondescript code names whereas all the other companies with data centers in the area have the company name labeled. For example, here's an AWS facility in us-east-1. Pairs of narrow white buildings, ACs on top, generators in parking lot, switching station next door, nondescript name: looks like an AWS data center to me. (Thanks to the WikiLeaks doc I happen to know for sure this really is AWS, but you can tell just from the satellite.) https://www.google.com/maps/@39.0271558,-77.4541392,698m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.0271558,-77.4541392,698m/dat... If you have the WikiLeaks document you can just google the "IAD50" type codes and generally find them, but that's no fun.

kkielhofner 4y ago

In terms of the cloud providers other than the big three/four (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle) most of your Digital Oceans, Linodes (perhaps pre-Akamai?), etc of the world are almost all certainly colocated. As others have noted the "big ones" typically operate with a blend - green field physical construction for the big and dense facilities combined with floors/cages/etc in colocation facilities for areas around the world with lower hardware requirements. Colocation facilities are interesting (I've been in a lot of them) and they generally (physically) fall in two buckets: 1) Repurposing of old telecom (and even telegraph!) buildings. CoreSite (a colocation provider) has a few floors (last I looked) in The Telegraph Building in Chicago[0]. If you look at the pictures of the exterior of the building it still says Western Union on the side! There are some interesting aspects of these - most of them are located in downtown areas. If you start looking around in major cities you will start to notice gigantic nondescript buildings with minimal signage, almost no foot traffic, and almost no (if any) windows[1]. If they have any signage at all it will typically be "Something Bell", Western Union, AT&T, etc. These facilities are interesting for a variety of reasons. Because they are repurposed telegraph and telecom buildings going back to the days of mechanical telecom switching[2] and DC battery banks they have floor load ratings that are just incredible. Something like 20x or whatever of a typical high-rise. Downside of these facilities is that on a square footage basis they typically can't support the cooling (and often electrical) requirements of modern compute equipment which is much more dense than the extremely heavy but relatively cool/low power mechanical switches and other equipment from decades ago. If you look at the picture of the Telegraph Building you will notice it's literally right next to the Chicago Stock Exchange. Needless to say these facilities are really popular for HFT stuff. 2) Purpose built facilities. These are typically located near population centers (for access to peering and other fiber) but out of downtown areas. Examples here are CH7 and CH3 from Equinix[3]. These are still close enough to major peering points and fiber distribution so access and latency isn't terrible but being in more "suburban" areas. Here they have more space to build, real estate is cheaper, and interestingly since 9/11 there has been a movement of sorts to move major hosting facilities outside of densely populated areas/potential terrorist targets. Then for your Google, Facebook, NSA, etc of the world they can build in fairly remote (rural) areas where they have essentially unlimited space and significantly higher security[4]. The kind of thing where law enforcement and private security can setup perimeters where if you get anywhere near the actual hosting facility you better have a reason to be there - as opposed to a downtown facility where thousands of people walk and drive by everyday without ever knowing it's there. [0] - http://wikimapia.org/30789188/Telegraph-Building-CoreSite-Data-Center http://wikimapia.org/30789188/Telegraph-Building-CoreSite-Da... [1] - https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/nsa-using-att-data-center-in-hells-kitchen-for-spy-program/ https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/nsa-using-att-data-center-in-h... [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI [3] - https://www.equinix.com/data-centers/americas-colocation/united-states-colocation/chicago-data-centers https://www.equinix.com/data-centers/americas-colocation/uni... [4] - https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/ https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

deltalima25 4y ago

You'd also be surprised to the extent at which it's possible to have datacentres within datacentres. Separate data rooms, or floors within the building can have different power, UPS, HVAC specifications (i.e. to a customer's requirements). Often, a datacenter provider might sign a over a proportion of the space to a large provider, and they essentially become an anchor tenant for the facility. The anchor tenant may even be involved during the build out phase to negotiate the spec etc.

speedgoose 4y ago

I was wondering where were the datacenters for Azure and GCP in my area, but I understood that they are simply using collocation in existing datacenters.

hohl 4y ago
Yes and no. They don't use the kind of co-location services you might be thinking about. Co-location targets the corporate world. Corporate world loves it to just hand off the servers and have it run for them. But if you go to a company such as Interxion/Digital Realities, they will just send you away (or more specifically, send you to one of their tenants that offers co-location services), because they are primarily real estate companies. They rent out empty rooms designed to be used for servers and even office space on their campuses. These are normal lease agreements and their purpose is that you put your own staff and infrastructure there. And that's what most mid-sized to large cloud providers actually use. They wouldn't even have the employees to touch servers or network equipment. What they take care of is ensuring that the AC is working, that the shared Diesel aggregates are ready in case of a power outage and that there is security personal patrolling the campus, but they won't enter rooms rented out to customers just like you wouldn't expect your landlord to go into your flat. (Equinix is a bit special on that point, since they offer both. You can get co-location too through Equinix, but it's probably not what AWS, GCP or Azure is using.)

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kelp 4y ago

This actually surprises me quite a bit. There are a lot of very expensive facilities on this list. Ones that I would not want to put much equipment in if I was at the scale I presume Digital Ocean is at. But maybe it's a factor of organic growth and starting each region small, then having to grow into it. You can often get space for like 1/3rd the cost of Equinix but with a lot less services and maybe less quality. Equinix makes a very nice datacenter but you sure do pay for it. If I were building a CDN or an edge compute product like Fly.io or Render, I'd certainly have a facility list that looked like this, because I'm charging a bit of a premium for excellent connectivity to population centers. Though I'd do some kind of managed hosting first until I had the scale to even get into collocation. But for a bulk cloud provider I'd try to only use these facilities for things like network POPs, DNS services, CDN, etc. Then lease fiber to another facility that was a lot cheaper for the bulk of my compute. But that does take a certain threshold of scale to get there, and a longish planning horizon to make it happen unless you're growing at insane rates.