[HN Gopher] DigitalOcean Region Information
___________________________________________________________________
DigitalOcean Region Information
Author : mtmail
Score : 122 points
Date : 2022-08-16 10:24 UTC (12 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (snapshooter.com)
| kkielhofner wrote:
| 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-
| Da...
|
| [1] - https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/nsa-using-att-data-center-
| in-h...
|
| [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI
|
| [3] - https://www.equinix.com/data-centers/americas-
| colocation/uni...
|
| [4] - https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
| jdoss wrote:
| The Coresite building you are talking about is 427 S. LaSalle
| and Coresite owns the whole thing. I worked for a company that
| was customer #1 on the first floor around 2007 or so when they
| were still renovating the building. We moved 4 racks from 600
| South Federal Street which was owned by Digital Reality Trust.
| Coresite built out 427 over time and IIRC Google has the entire
| 5th or 6th floors or at least they did back when I left the
| company in 2015.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Sure is (first link has the address). I was there once around
| '09/'10 for a tour and only remember them showing 2-3 floors
| which, again from what I remember, was the shared colocation
| space at the time. IIRC at least one floor was newly built
| out and barely occupied. We signed with them and I never had
| to go inside again.
|
| As far as Chicago goes from what I remember someone at the
| company had a bad experience with DRT so we never looked at
| 600 S Federal but we did look at Equinix at 350 E Cermak
| (which REALLY stands out) and a handful of others that
| weren't memorable.
|
| Thanks for the added detail!
| kelp wrote:
| Being inside those old repurposed telecom buildings can be
| WILD. I was in one that had overhead bundles of ethernet and
| fiber that had to be multiple feet thick, with the ladder rack
| bowing down under the weight. Elevator shafts were repurposed
| for running wires and fiber.
|
| And then the building Google owns in Manhattan:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue
|
| That had a bunch of carrier hotels in it, I'm not sure if
| Google managed to kick them all out yet, since many had long
| term leases. But the building has a bunch of truck elevators in
| it... literally can load a truck up into the building. And a
| ton of fiber connectivity's which is why the carrier hotels
| were in there.
| [deleted]
| kelp wrote:
| 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.
| mjwhansen wrote:
| innnnteresting
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| 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.
| fayalargeau wrote:
| that is honestly one of the cooler perks i've heard of
| mrsimonbennett wrote:
| Wikileaks released them in 2018
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wikileaks-publish...
|
| Seems the URL is down however https://wikileaks.org/amazon-
| atlas/
| nixgeek wrote:
| Amazon has also expanded massively since 2018 and the
| additions are going to be equally secret in location terms,
| probably.
| electroly wrote:
| 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/dat...
|
| If you have the WikiLeaks document you can just google the
| "IAD50" type codes and generally find them, but that's no fun.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| Clicking into the maps link, it seems like another strategy
| is looking for names like "Performance Plaza" and
| "Reliability Street" haha
| nik736 wrote:
| PeeringDB lists all facilities where DO is located (and some more
| information): https://www.peeringdb.com/net/6494
| mrsimonbennett wrote:
| 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
| paulgb wrote:
| NYC2 is the Google NYC HQ (although Google bought the building,
| there are still some non-Google tenants)
| CPLX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And NYC1 and NYC3 are in NJ, perhaps unsurprisingly.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You might want to read up on the Schrems II (2) case regarding
| the GDPR and a US company.
| shafyy wrote:
| 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
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| What world are we in where a guy hosting a blog needs to read
| about GDPR.
| dtx1 wrote:
| A world where that person might want to track users or sell
| privacy intrusive advertisments on their blog.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > they apply wether you like it or not.
|
| The EU has ruled, now let them enforce it!
| pavlov wrote:
| 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 naivete 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 wrote:
| 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.
| i_have_to_speak wrote:
| > BLR1 - NTT Communications Mumbai DC6
|
| Uh, pretty sure the Bangalore data center is not in Mumbai.
| nik736 wrote:
| They are located here: https://www.netmagicsolutions.com/data-
| center/bengaluru/beng...
| mrsimonbennett wrote:
| Thanks I will look into it and update it :)
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's great value in being close to interconnect points
| instead of needing to pull fiber from your field.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| moondev wrote:
| 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?
| thejosh wrote:
| I don't know of many with the cash to actually build and
| operate their own DCs? I don't think it's financially viable to
| do so, it's better to just rent part of one?
| [deleted]
| exabrial wrote:
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > These professional data center providers serve 911 and
| financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat
| pictures.
|
| You're ignorant - countless major serious businesses,
| government organisations, and NGOs are running on AWS.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| laughs in NASA.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/tag/nasa/
|
| First hand experience here.
| seized wrote:
| >while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat picture
|
| That's an absurd stance and you should know better. It's
| common knowledge that hugely important companies run on GCP
| and AWS.
| remus wrote:
| > 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| AWS/GCP are pretty much as good as anyone reliablity-wise,
| as long as your product is multi-AZ etc.
|
| But SLAs are a joke - your business should be making $100
| for every $1 you spend on compute, the fact they'll refund
| your $1 is trivial compared to your $100 loss.
| jrockway wrote:
| I mean, they're an infrastructure company, not an
| insurance company. If your power goes out, you don't get
| compensated for the $1M deal you would have closed if
| only your lights were on. If it's that important, you
| have a backup.
|
| I think the reality is that if stores are closed or
| websites are down, people will just come back later.
| Maybe not so much for ad serving (if you're bored at work
| and Reddit is down, you're not going to make time after
| work to go view ads there), but for actual businesses, it
| might not be as big a problem as people would like to
| imagine. But if it is, that's why you can spend millions
| on a multi-cloud solution.
| sofixa wrote:
| A professional datacenter provider, Equinix, provided one
| year notice for a datacenter closing (PA1). AWS would never
| do anything like that to their customers.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Equinix has physical equipment belonging to their
| customers. AWS doesn't. It's not even remotely similar.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| If I have equipment in a datacentre like Equinix, I likely
| also have circuits (with minimum terms), network equipment
| and servers (physical devices) that I need to manage and
| consider how to physically relocate.
|
| When I have a service with AWS, I have software I need to
| relocate.
|
| The needs and constraints of relocating software from 1000
| servers is very very different to the needs and constraints
| of relocating 25 racks of equipment.
|
| Unless you have 1000 AWS 'pets' instead of 'cattle', in
| which case you'll wish you could just lift-and-shift.
| bombcar wrote:
| AWS would probably just silently migrate you to wherever
| the new datacenter is located.
| notakio wrote:
| A large number of cloud providers will likely have a blend of
| their own datacenters as well as installations within other
| providers' centers. I've been in that data center at 200 Paul
| Ave in San Francisco, back in early 2010, and can confirm that
| at the time, it definitely had multiple floors' worth of
| racked, running equipment owned by Facebook, despite them
| already having their own data centers at that point.
| pbalau wrote:
| Facebook uses quite a bit other providers DCs, for their
| POPs. They fully own the DCs where they run the core
| services.
| nik736 wrote:
| AWS is also using Interxion in Frankfurt, same campus as
| DigitalOcean.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I think the idea behind most cloud providers is that they
| abstract details like that away.
| hohl wrote:
| None of them does, for most of their locations.
|
| Owning real estate simply isn't their main business purpose and
| has many downsides, especially in matters of scalability. The
| main pro reason for owning them is cost. Owning the buildings
| makes you less flexible but saves you money in the long-term.
|
| One more point in favor of leasing is: the relevant
| ,,neighbors" are just next door. If you own the real estate,
| it's probably in the middle of nowhere, network-wise, and you
| end up spending lots on laying fibre. Whereas with leased
| space, other providers are likely on the same campus and all
| you need is a few 100 meter or one km of fibre to reach the
| next building or even just the next room. If you are small
| enough, these savings on connectivity can even end up making it
| cheaper to lease.
|
| Might be a surprise to many, but it's primarily the budget
| providers (Hetzner and OVH) that own their own buildings.
|
| Most others just have long-term leases with whoever owns the
| real estate (usually Equinix or Interxion/Digital Realities, as
| they more or less own most big DCs around the globe).
|
| Also, I guess many miss-understand what ,,not own the DC"
| really means. These services aren't the kind of retail-style
| colocation offers. Those providers rent entire rooms or even
| buildings there, run their own infrastructure in them and
| frequently have their own staff and offices on site too. These
| lease agreements behave more like a usual office or warehouse
| lease, not what some here might think.
| kelp wrote:
| TL;DR it depends on the use case, but I'd expect everyone in
| the top 5-8 cloud providers to own and operate at least some of
| their own facilities. But everyone is going to have some space
| in a collocation facility.
|
| There are various degrees of "operate your own datacenter" in
| the datacenter market.
|
| A lot of facilities on this list, like Equinix, are retail
| datacenters. They have things like 24/7 "smart hands" who you
| can call to go repair a server, replace or move a networking
| cable, things like that. These are the most full service
| options. They also offer various network connectivity products,
| and if you are willing to pay for it, you could go as far as
| ship them servers or a rack and have them do much of the
| install for you. These are the most expensive options, but, at
| least in the case of Equinix they also typically have the best
| network connectivity. This is your typical collocation, or even
| carrier hotel.
|
| So if you go into an Equinix facility in a lot of markets you
| will see _everyone_ with racks or cages full of equipment in
| there. Though the biggest players are mostly going to use them
| for network POPs and maybe something like a CDN node. So you
| might see Amazon CloudFront equipment in there, but not much
| else.
|
| Often the thing to do is put your public internet connectivity,
| peering, and perhaps backbone links in a well connected place
| like this, but the bulk of your compute is in a much larger and
| cheaper facility elsewhere.
|
| There are also retail collocation facilities that aren't super
| well connected (when I say well connected I mean you can get
| access to 10s or 100s of providers just by being in that
| facility) and those are a lot cheaper than Equinix, and often
| full service. They tend to cater to smaller customers. Though
| I've seen Akamai have a ton of racks in some surprisingly
| crappy faculties.
|
| Then DRT (Digital Reality Trust) operates more in the wholesale
| datacenter market. They can rent cages for multiple racks, but
| are even more used to renting out whole datahalls, so you have
| dedicated space. In a lot of areas they can't really offer
| things like 24/7 smart hands. They aren't going to handhold you
| nearly as much, and space and power tends to be a lot cheaper,
| but your minimum buy is going to be a lot larger. 20-100 racks
| maybe?
|
| CoreSite kind of straddles the line between Retail and
| Wholesale. They offer a lot of full service stuff, but can also
| rent you out a whole data hall or even building at a campus if
| you need it. No one would ever confirm this, but I'm _pretty_
| sure one of the big 3 cloud providers has a big chunk of, the
| CoreSite Silicon Valley campus. If you search Google Maps for
| core site silicon valley you 'll see a cluster of about 5
| buildings, all labeled. One building right there is
| suspiciously unlabeled, but if you do the the Satellite view,
| it's clearly a datacenter.
|
| Take it another step, and you have companies like Sabey who
| offer a datacenter shell. Basically a building with power,
| generators, etc, but you do everything else, or they customize
| it to your specs and help operate it. Yet again cheaper per
| unit of compute you are doing, but a lot high minimum spend to
| make sense. You'll probably be measuring things in MW
| (megawatts) before you are looking at something like this.
| Sabey also sells to retail datacenters. I spent far too much
| time at the Sabey Tukilla campus south of Seattle from 2009 -
| 2011 in an Internap facility. I had to go through Sabey
| security to get into the building, and then Internap security
| to get into their space. Most everything inside that space was
| taken care of by Internap (now seemingly branded INAP).
|
| Then you have build and operate your own datacenter, which also
| has various degrees. I don't know how it works now, but I know
| a few years back AWS had (has) a TON of buildings in the
| Ashburn Virginia area that are us-east-1. I was told by someone
| who worked in datacenter real estate that they typically would
| buy the land and get a datacenter shell built, then sell it to
| another operator and lease it back. Then bring in all their own
| power and compute.
|
| I also heard that a few years ago when Oracle was building out
| their cloud, they were just buying up all the retail datacenter
| space they could so they could get to market faster. They were
| paying an arm and a leg for it, but that was the fastest way to
| get online.
|
| So the economics of all this depend on what you are doing, why
| you have the space, and how much actual equipment you need in
| there. At smaller scales, say a CDN, or just networking
| equipment, it often makes the most sense to just lease retail
| space. At larger and larger scales it makes more and more sense
| to in-house more of it.
|
| I've never worked at one of the large cloud providers, but I'd
| expect they have some smaller regions that are retail or
| wholesale datacenters operated by another provider. But the
| large regions are mostly owned and operated.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The hyperscale cloud providers are so big that they need to
| self host to reduce power consumption. They also use alot of
| custom designed parts to maximize cooling and power efficiency
| -- at the cost of inflexibility. The overhead of being a tenant
| in a multi-tenant data center is too much.
|
| A smaller provider usually sees a financial advantage to lease
| or build traditional datacenter space. "Smaller" can be quite
| large... I worked with an enterprise team that built out a
| large private data center circa 2015. Something on the order of
| low six figure server count. At that time the dollars worked
| out to build vs. cloud, mostly due to security control
| requirements. YMMV.
| nixgeek wrote:
| "self host to reduce power consumption" isn't entirely
| accurate, even within a leased environment at Equinix or
| using a typical 'powered shell' provider like Sabey, the
| larger providers will still be customizing heavily many
| aspects downstream of the switchgear (and that's where some
| but not all of these efficiencies can be located).
|
| Tidbits from Peter Desantis' keynotes and before that James
| Hamilton at re:Invent indicate that like Meta, Amazon doesn't
| use 19" form-factor racks, has in-rack UPS solutions, DC
| power delivery and a sled-based server architecture. All
| these videos are on YouTube and the last 3-4 years (2018
| onward) are really interesting and worth watching.
|
| I'm short I'd guess Amazon and others partnerships with
| Equinix (and equivalents) are about two things: time to
| market, and some markets not being worth the investment [1]
| to drop 3x 30MW facilities into.
|
| [1]
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/marketwatch/cutting-
| da...
| sofixa wrote:
| Some AWS, Azure and GCP availability zones run out of third
| party (at least Equinix) datacenters. It's easier and cheaper
| for the more "niche" regions - nobody will use the Paris region
| outside of customers in and around France, does it make sense
| to build and operate 3 DCs for such a market? Apparently AWS
| decided that it doesn't and they use Equinix PA2 and PA3, among
| others, for that.
| mkl95 wrote:
| > nobody will use the Paris region outside of customers in
| and around France, does it make sense to build and operate 3
| DCs for such a market? Apparently AWS decided that it doesn't
| and they use Equinix PA2 and PA3, among others, for that.
|
| There may be something else to it... they are launching a
| Spain region [1] this year with three data centers. My guess
| is that it will be both heavily subsidized and much cheaper
| to operate than a similar project in France.
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/coming-soon-
| aws-la...
| smoe wrote:
| I think it might also be, that if you are a company working
| on public sector projects, servers being within the country
| is required or preferred to win the contracts.
|
| Haven't been in this space in a long time, but when I did
| work on such projects in Switzerland mid 2000s having
| anything outside the country would at least raise eyebrows.
| Back then we had to run most things on-premise, but from
| what I have heard, they opened up to the cloud to a degree.
|
| See also the tags of the article "[...] Education,
| Government, Healthcare, Nonprofit, Public Sector, [...]"
| heipei wrote:
| I believe AWS is also using Equinix in some locations.
| EwanToo wrote:
| 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/
| hhw wrote:
| 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.
| deltalima25 wrote:
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