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"As a customer you should care that their service is geographically distributed" Don't agree. If you own the data center you have more control over it. We had

by larrys 14y ago

"As a customer you should care that their service is geographically distributed" Don't agree. If you own the data center you have more control over it. We had a case where the UPS systems in a data center had bad batteries and equipment went down because the batteries failed to kick in. Since we don't own the data center we have no realistic way to make inspections and make sure the right thing happens or that the batteries (or the generators) are cycled and maintained. We just have to trust. [1] Now this may or may not matter with the way they have their redundancy setup. But owning a data center does give you more control over more things. "not whether they own the buildings where the servers are kept." Owning the data center and owning the buildings are two different things. Owning the building is owning real estate. Owning the data center is owning the security setup, backup systems etc. Two different things. [1] So as not to contradict myself with other things I have said I should not say "trust" because you can always put some things in place to verify the right thing is happening (inspections, logs etc.) if you want. But if you own the place it's easier. If I own my home I can decide when to replace the HVAC so it doesn't fail in the middle of the summer. If I rent that's up to the landlord.

acdha 14y ago
The downside is that this obligates you to do a wider variety of tasks. I'd be surprised if CloudFlare has enough profit margin to afford many redundant electrical engineers, physical network & power techs, etc. in 23 widely dispersed locations. It's obvious that the extra expense wouldn't have helped in this case but it certainly would consume a big chunk of money and management time. Part of being a business is that you have to make tradeoffs in the real world rather than game-theoretical perfect moves. In many cases this means carefully writing contracts because you can't afford the certain expense and distraction of doing it in-house in the hope that the results might be slightly better.
oijaf888 14y ago
Or you could just engineer your systems to take that into account and realize that you can't trust the data center's power so you have to be able to quickly and easily shift all the load to another one.

by larrys 14y ago

acdha 14y ago

The downside is that this obligates you to do a wider variety of tasks. I'd be surprised if CloudFlare has enough profit margin to afford many redundant electrical engineers, physical network & power techs, etc. in 23 widely dispersed locations. It's obvious that the extra expense wouldn't have helped in this case but it certainly would consume a big chunk of money and management time. Part of being a business is that you have to make tradeoffs in the real world rather than game-theoretical perfect moves. In many cases this means carefully writing contracts because you can't afford the certain expense and distraction of doing it in-house in the hope that the results might be slightly better.

oijaf888 14y ago

Or you could just engineer your systems to take that into account and realize that you can't trust the data center's power so you have to be able to quickly and easily shift all the load to another one.