[HN Gopher] Our digital lives need data centers. What goes on in...
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Our digital lives need data centers. What goes on inside them?
Author : perihelions
Score : 32 points
Date : 2024-09-17 21:35 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| dusted wrote:
| Honestly, the Internet as a decentralized global network of
| computers suggests otherwise. There really shouldn't be any, or
| very few, datacenters, people should host their own stuff from
| their own machines, from their own homes.
|
| Unfortunately, culture and technology took a different road.
|
| It might be hard to look beyond status-quo, but it USED to be
| easy to _SEND_EMAIL_ from your own machine into the world, sure
| it came with problems, but they could be overcome.
|
| It USED to be easy to host a website on your home computer,
| simply ask for a static ip, and forward a port or two on your
| router.
|
| All of this was taken away from us in the holy name of
| convenience (and corporate greed).
| euroderf wrote:
| What I would like from the cloud is absolutely positively
| guaranteed lifetime backups of everything I deem important
| enough, and heavily encrypted to boot. Everything else cloudish
| is... extremely optional.
| ben_w wrote:
| IIRC direct sending of mail wasn't removed in the name of
| convenience, it was removed in the name of "99% of incoming
| mail is junk, can we permanently reject the worst offenders?"
| jeffbee wrote:
| Distributed hosting is incredibly inefficient.
| AyyEye wrote:
| Distributed hosting is incredibly efficient.
|
| Me browsing a website for my local pizza joint _should_ be a
| connection from my pc, through a couple of switches /routers,
| to the PC in their office.
|
| As it stands now I have to route out of town to the nearest
| datacenter hosting their web platform. Then I need to make
| more requests out of town to every third party analytic,
| font, and framework their platform includes. Not to mention
| the associated energy cost of running all of that code.
|
| Every one of those requests triggers a cascade of dozens of
| database updates, replications, and algorithm updates across
| many geographically diverse datacenters.
|
| (Yes I am aware that 'distributed' means many different
| things depending on the context and is largely a meaningless
| word)
| smelendez wrote:
| Restaurants are a good example of where this breaks down,
| though, I think.
|
| There are cash-only bars with mechanical registers, and
| food trucks with no electric hookups, and small third-party
| kitchens in bars and corner stores that all have websites
| or at least social media profiles with hours, menu,
| location, etc.
|
| These businesses have no interest in running a web server.
| They may not even have internet access onsite beyond
| employee cellphones.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Wrong angle.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Exactly right. No one is bemoaning the lack of
| restauranteurs constructing their own buildings or
| farming their own food. Why do we want them to host their
| own website?
| INTPenis wrote:
| You're absolutely right, and yet the romantic in me still
| thinks there is hope.
|
| I have an excellent example where some friends used to
| run a wifi mesh in my city. They handed out mesh nodes to
| small business owners like restaurants and corner shops.
| These devices were tiny, and only required power since
| they were mesh nodes.
|
| The point here is that these nodes lasted for years.
| Sometimes we went around and restarted, or updated
| firmware, but by and large they worked so well that they
| were forgotten by the business owner.
|
| This was 10 years ago, today a local web server, or
| similar device, might work in a similar way.
|
| One idea would be to integrate it into their internet
| package. They get a router that gives their shop wifi, at
| the same time it also runs their ordering system.
|
| I think it's possible, anything is possible if you're
| motivated, but large businesses don't like independence.
| They prefer that small business and end users are
| dependent on them.
| lionkor wrote:
| Most of this is people like you and me completely ignoring IPv6
| and similar technologies, just because they're not the default
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| It's really an economy of scale thing, and is not that
| surprising.
|
| The economy of scale is separately at the level of hardware
| procurement, security, interop, bandwidth, access to
| electricity, and probably other things.
|
| This isn't a normative claim. Simply that the tendency for
| these types of things to centralize as complexity and demand
| increases is natural.
|
| I think it's tough to say that it was taken away, or that
| there's anybody in particular to blame.
|
| The hardware market moves fast, the capabilities needed evolve
| fast, etc.
|
| It's still 100% possible to host your own stuff. Many people
| do, but it's obviously a vast minority. But it's not like there
| are licensure requirements to host your own website. Some
| things are disallowed by consumer ISPs, but you can also
| generally upgrade that allow it.
|
| It's worth noting that when it was simple and unrestricted, it
| was also vastly more expensive and far fewer people
| participated. Part of the reason why internet is so cheap now
| (on a $ / byte basis) is that new offerings were designed that
| restricted people on the now available cheap plans from doing
| things that are very expensive.
| jalk wrote:
| Can you can give an example of what expensive things those
| cheap plans are restricted from having access to (IPv4
| blocks?)
| lmz wrote:
| A public IPv4 address for some, general restrictions
| against using it as a server / hosting any services in the
| AUP for others.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > It's still 100% possible to host your own stuff.
|
| It's absolutely not.
|
| A minority of people have direct access to a network that
| will let other people reach any service they want to host.
| You need to carefully select your location to get that. And a
| lot of people don't even have direct access to a public
| address.
|
| And that's not even going into the monopolized federated
| protocols like email, where you can only do anything if big-
| tech allows.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think I disagree... desktops are pretty inexpensive in the
| grand scheme of things. I mean most of us could host our
| stuff on a raspberry pi or something like that. It isn't like
| we'd individually need to handle a ton of traffic.
|
| Rather I think the problem is that most server (software) was
| pretty poorly written, to the point where it requires
| professional administration and maintainence. Although, this
| did create a lot of IT jobs. I guess there isn't anyone,
| really incentivized to architect things better.
| nine_k wrote:
| You could run your blog off your machine at home, much like
| you (hopefully) run your home automation from a machine at
| home, not a cloud instance.
|
| Serving your collection of videos from home is a bit ore
| taxing, should anything become popular. And if you produce
| popular videos, you want to handle subscriptions and
| comments, accept payments, fend off spam, and weather the
| occasional DoS attack. Things quickly snowball into a full-
| time sysop job.
|
| This is to say nothing of businesses that need hundreds of
| boxes. Putting them all in the office building means you
| have really hard time moving, e.g. because you grow and
| need more space, even as we ignore the question of
| redundant power and internet links in the building.
|
| Datacenters most honestly deserve their place. They make
| life easier for many people, for many reasons. They are not
| the only thing that should exist, but very certainly they
| are not a mistake or aberration.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Woz was famously quoted as "what is this - biggest datacenter
| takes all?"
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The internet protocols suggest this but the common 1gbps/35Mbps
| suggest that they want you to use it to consume rather than
| host.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| >All of this was taken away from us in the holy name of
| convenience (and corporate greed)
|
| Corporate greed will serve up whatever people will pay for. I
| (and nearly 100% of people) am willing to pay for the
| convenience of not running my own email service, so the greedy
| corporations which sold that solution succeeded while others
| failed.
|
| Also think of Capex vs Opex. I don't want to drop $4k on an at-
| home PC to play with new AI toys, but I am willing to spend $20
| per month paying for ChatGPT and Claude AI access.
| codergautam wrote:
| https://archive.ph/u5nuM
| jeffbee wrote:
| I searched and cannot find the answer in their archives: has the
| Washington Post, or any other nationally prominent newspaper,
| ever written coverage from this standpoint, but about an oil
| refinery?
| passion__desire wrote:
| One thing that could explain this dichotomy is that writing
| such an article for oil refinery would be expensive task.
| Because data for such research may not be readily available
| online (not focussing on intentions). Just a guess. You will
| find more articles about things that are easy to write about.
| If an article requires lot of field work, on foot research,
| talking to many people and synthesize and piece together
| disparate information in a coherent manner, don't expect it to
| be commissioned.
| dopylitty wrote:
| Seriously. Next up from the Post an article about how great and
| important leaded gasoline is.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I at least expected a description of the conditions inside data
| centers that portrayals in movies in TV shows always seem to
| get wrong: how _loud_ and _cold_ they are.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Only colos are cold, though. Private hyperscalers keep theirs
| nice and hot.
| finnh wrote:
| From my own adventures in colocation, i came to conclude that
| data centers are Narnia, in the worst possible way: you enter to
| perform what feels like 30 minutes worth of work, and somehow 8
| hours pass before you see the outside world again.
| throwup238 wrote:
| They've got all the hallmarks of a casino. Zero natural
| lighting, tons of blinking lights, and the occasional dopamine
| hit when a server goes down.
| remram wrote:
| > dopamine hit when a server goes down
|
| You mean adrenaline?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| And this is why I love colocation.
|
| Knowing you're sitting next to a rack of blinking lights of god
| knows what.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Reminds me of my trips to Fry's electronics in the old days.
| ;-)
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I guess I only use the cloud for my email. No social media
| either. The climate aspect of these data centers frightens me
| that I took all my stuff off the cloud and store it locally. Even
| my email I store locally with thunderbird.
| kevindamm wrote:
| re: the climate aspect, it's actually better to have some
| services like email operating in a data center. Think about all
| the idle no-op cycles your home email server is burning
| through. A million individual email servers will consume orders
| of magnitude more electricity than those same million+ accounts
| hosted in a data center. Efficiencies of scale.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| RE climate argument, your marginal impact on the environment is
| likely going to be _worse_ with storing stuff locally vs. in
| the cloud. Even including the extra security /maintenance work
| that you don't need locally, the data center is still going to
| have more efficient hardware that's managed better, and gets
| all kinds of economies of scale, including efficiency (cooling)
| and utilization (via virtualization, if you're just using a
| service or VM and not colocating).
|
| I say that as someone who prefers local-first and avoid cloud
| dependencies like a plague.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| My photos are on my internal SSD drive. I don't know how who
| having them on a cloud server is better ecologically. I don't
| access my old photos really, sort of like a photo album under
| the coffee table.
|
| Taking less or no photos is kind of my thing now anyway.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| So you're decreasing your ecological impact by simply not
| doing what other people do. In other words it's not that
| you're local vs cloud. You're using local-S3-glacier and
| other people are using cloud-S3 + cloud-EC2.
| 1-6 wrote:
| The answer: Beep, Bop, Beep!
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| I like to see articles about the hidden systems that make so much
| of the modern world work, I think it's a positive thing to allow
| common people to have that perspective if they're interested.
| However, when I do see stories about datacenters and the like, I
| just really sort of despair, to be perfectly honest.
|
| I see how little the industry has changed and innovated since the
| 'modern' datacenter crawled out from the legacy telephone
| switching centers. You still see the marks (read: scars) left on
| the old in the new: same sized racks in width, asinine cold and
| hot aisles shuffling hot air around blown about by fan after fan
| after fan screaming away endlessly until they throw their
| bearings. The energy moved about among so many different
| interfaces, air/water/air/refrigerant/water/air and around and
| around and back again. It's the same feeling as railroad gauges
| echoing the ancient wheeled carriage ruts in the hard dirt
| because we can't be arsed to make anything better.
|
| You'd think that with all of the developments of omg distributed
| computing that every tech dweeb loves to bandy about that they're
| experts in that there would be a stampede to, you know, actually
| make use of some new technology, moving the data and compute
| closer to the user (and don't talk to me about edge facilities,
| they're just more of the same), reduce the blast radius of the
| idiocy of centralization, pare down the eye watering waste of
| facilities like this. But no, it's still client-server
| everything, maybe put a copy in another region if you're feeling
| kinky, but the promise of decentralization and distribution
| hasn't really materialized. Such a large percentage of people now
| have phenomenal power they carry with them at all times, but
| they're just dumbed-down gateways to these huge black holes of
| resources because the control needs to remain held in the same
| hands as the capital that continues to build them larger and
| larger.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is that in an ideal world that
| uses the technology that it develops in a sane way, these places
| really shouldn't exist anymore, like another comment suggested.
| The fundamentals are all there, it's just the incentives are so
| out of whack it's comical. Build bigger and bigger facilities and
| collect more and more data and fritter away cycle after cycle and
| maybe you'll increase your year-over-year by a couple dozen basis
| points. And since the demand is so insatiably fueled by this
| feedback, nothing will change. You could have minuscule
| neighborhood nodes scattered around a city that sips resources in
| comparison that does all of this in concert with the portable
| supercomputers we all carry, each benefiting a small handful of
| people at once but the beast must. be. fed.
| trhway wrote:
| Oracle talks nuclear in the data enters, MS partnered to start a
| Three Mile reactor for them. Whatever goes inside now, even the
| close future looks even more complex.
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