Post B6MY2HlPeJyEnTVdwW by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
(DIR) More posts by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
(DIR) Post #B6M8533kB8GNFjjy3E by cwebber@social.coop
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My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters. 2005-2007, I was a datacenter assistant monkey working from Google working somewhere in the Chicago suburbs, swapping out hard drives and ram and writing shell scripts, as myself and my friends unknowingly laid down the prototype for the kinds of datacenters we all see today.And so it is with some significant expertise that I say:Fuck datacenters. Datacenters are an anti-pattern.
(DIR) Post #B6MFgAxgSbUE9fYZyC by cwebber@social.coop
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Working in that environment, seeing as Google rolled out the idea of "cloud computing" meaning "you have no involvement or agency in your computing because we do it for you" radicalized me for much of the work of my career.It was one thing to run a datacenter to index the world's public web information. I understood that, it made sense.But watching as Google and Apple co-developed the idea that computers, which I cared about, got abstracted into toys and jewelry that had all your key computing done in a way you had no agency over... where I saw firsthand the kinds of churn of resources necessary to keep these things going, it made me want to fight for a different computing future.
(DIR) Post #B6MY2HlPeJyEnTVdwW by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@cwebber yes, this!I said that when I heard of that cloud thing for the first time. They laughed at me. People still tell me that it’s the new and now only way of doing things and required for work 🤮
(DIR) Post #B6MY6NrutS5ytCVQLQ by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
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@cwebber do you have a writeup expanding on “datacenters are an anti-pattern” because this is 100% how I feel. I’m not fighting over AI. I’m still fighting over the cloud. Society has badly fumbled the fact that everyone has incredible computing power in their pocket. We’ve already been wasting electricity on idle servers and inefficient high level code. I’ve been - and am - part of the problem, moving functionality to the cloud for business reasons I hate.
(DIR) Post #B6MY6O3cBxS9TTylZw by cwebber@social.coop
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@thomasjwebb I've been meaning to write a blogpost for a long time. Sounds like it's time to write it!
(DIR) Post #B6MY6OJDFxviFrHDtI by Reinald@nrw.social
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@cwebber @thomasjwebb I remember "datacenter" starting as "colocation hoster" - you rentet rackspace or several racks with redundant power supply, internet link, packed in some pizzaboxes and a router, and there you go. Physical safety was better than the rack with dev servers in the basement, so what else could you ask for?
(DIR) Post #B6MY6OVcVpr2sL58EK by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@Reinald @thomasjwebb @cwebber colocation of your own stuff is ok
(DIR) Post #B6MYBEhiOVmfuj31jU by farfalk@toot.community
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@cwebber that's an interesting point of view. I mean, of course the current datacenter craze is complete madness, but it seems you consider an anti-pattern the concept of datacenter itself. Why is it so? What do you suggest as an alternate solution to the problems data centers try to solve?
(DIR) Post #B6MYBEsLkyI6Ri1WJE by cwebber@social.coop
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@farfalk Datacenters are concentrations of power. Anytime a datacenter is involved, it's a sign of power centralization. The rise of datacenters corresponds with the death of p2p and other visions of a more decentralized internet.
(DIR) Post #B6MYBF5SyCmb6O9zkm by johns@librem.one
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@cwebber @farfalk I think it more corresponds to the death of personal computing as it was? People don't have desktops anymore and barely have laptops other than for work? Which is a problem for p2p? Seems like most people's decentralized/federated nodes for things are hosted in data centers? All question marks because just speculating.
(DIR) Post #B6MYBFLlzZpJuxn1Ae by celeduc@mastodon.social
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@johns @cwebber @farfalk it's telling that hardware for user-controlled computing is disappearing. Memory and storage are disappearing from the market and it feels *intentional*. https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business
(DIR) Post #B6MreBNXjdv37y82wC by Reinald@nrw.social
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@mirabilos @thomasjwebb @cwebber I love it. Put some powerful blade system like a cisco UCS, some storage system and a small tape library, and you are ready for allmost everything. For some more complex network setups a dedicated load balancer might be useful. But you can build so crazy powerful stuff in two full racks...
(DIR) Post #B6MreBZF29HDiFbOAi by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@Reinald @thomasjwebb @cwebber eh, my needs are much lower. At this point in time, I have:a computer from the last millennium as main server at home, not public-facing, but fixed IPa dedicated server from the early 2000s which still works, at hoster A currently in Francetwo rather tiny VMs with annoyingly slow storage at hoster B in Germanya slightly beefier VM with SSD-backed storage at nominally hoster A but probably really the american company who bought them but still in a data centre in Francea VM on my gf’s dedicated server at mass hoster C in Germany, which is my backup server (currently restic), deliberately IPv6-onlydomains at hoster D in Germany, but the nameservers are among those systems listed abovean old computer from my former employer, with two new HDDs, on the consumer DSL at home, as copy of the backup storage and also occasional build server, etc.so far one “pihole” (really AdGuard Home atm), will need to set up a secondlaptopsSPARCstationsThis gives me geographic split into at least two operating and two backup sites. I don’t have the need for that much oomph at any given single site but like the redundancy (I also (had to… forgot a LUKS password…) tested restore, half an hour and the VM was back up). Recovery for a lost site would take longer due to changing IPs, but still possible with low enough data loss, but definitely still annoying of course.I also need to move some things around and set up OpenVPN (likely classical server-clients star layout, even if mesh would be nicer here) so they have fixed IPv6 “among each other”, currently backing up those behind consumer or roadwarrior connections is done with SSH forwarding, which is annoying, and LUKS unlock at boot also needs IPv6 (wrote the initramfs glue for that myself, as the existing v4 support fails for the v6-only box and one of the others due to networking irregularities). Ideally, this can also give me v6 on the laptop at sites lacking it. For this, I need to set up a CA first… *sigh…* (existing ones were just made unusable) I need more spoons.
(DIR) Post #B6N45DN3dRpaZhYf2W by rl_dane@polymaths.social
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@cwebberI worked in a data center from 2002-2013, moving from an infosec role to sysadmin halfway through (so more and more down among the racks as time went on).This particular datacenter was built in the late 70s, under the rule of "old I.T./Data Processing," where guys would come in at 8, grab a cup of coffee, grab a stack of greenbar printouts, and spend a couple hours going over reports before really starting the day. The laid-back atmosphere lasted until the late-mid 2000s, when the company got sold, we all got outsourced to a TLA, and it turned into (relatively speaking) a living hell. (Probably paradise compared to today's I.T., though).The actual computer rooms were all in the basement, so all you saw above-ground was offices/cubicles.I had dreams about deep, dark foreboding computer basements for years after leaving I.T. 😂I cannot imagine what modern datacenters must be like.If things progress the way they are, I can see datacenter terrorism (e.g. Molotov Cocktails and such) being a real thing. Just imagine people seeing their children not able to access potable water while Giga Mechanical Turk* down the streets sucks down the municipal water supply while belching pollutants and screeching noise.I wanted the future to be Star Trek, not Cyberpunk, dammit.I'm incensed that the modern computing needs of the average person could be handily served by a $100 junk PC, but now we have to build planet-destroying industrial data centers to serve up stochastic smalltalk. Freaking heck.* Referring to a historical fake-automaton, not an epithet against Turkic people, of whom I (partially) am one.cc: @mirabilos
(DIR) Post #B6N45ERLeyrDtIZbMm by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@rl_dane @cwebberI cannot imagine what modern datacenters must be like.Cold, and loud enough you’d need ear protection by law, at least in the actual server rooms. Artificial lighting only, of course, even if it’s above-ground. And security to fear, even if [sometimes duck-tried (Thread)].That’s modern as in before 2019.
(DIR) Post #B6OCpU0f6AFmI7cFcG by Colman@mastodon.ie
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@mirabilos @Reinald @thomasjwebb @cwebber apparently not. Most of the people in these threads seem never to have heard of a data centre before last year. I’ve been hosting stuff in them since 1994 at least. At that point they were mostly for telecoms gear. Though I’ve almost never done the cloud compute thing.
(DIR) Post #B6OCpUE8I51qxtv0c4 by cwebber@social.coop
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@Colman @mirabilos @Reinald @thomasjwebb Yeah, we are far from those days for the most part. I'm very familiar with those. But most datacenter deployments aren't like that anymore.
(DIR) Post #B6OCpUPTbu6RX5E4IK by Reinald@nrw.social
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@cwebber @Colman @mirabilos @thomasjwebb nobody needed Datacenters. Internet was located at universities, including mail, web, usenet, ... Personal homepages started with ~/johndoe...Colocation providers started, AFAIR, with private hosters offering shared webservers and domains for everybody. With the first "internet bubble" the demand grew, and facilities were build either near network hubs or near energy hubs. Many grew organic. With a wild mixture of infrastructure.
(DIR) Post #B6OCpUbWt5kC8Srh56 by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@cwebber @Colman @thomasjwebb @Reinald if you’re situated at a university, then you’re lucky, I guess. But from my PoV, UserDir at a university server is data centre hosting except your URLs break when you change departments or leave, i.e. even worse.
(DIR) Post #B6OCpUkOM8piZx0ltY by Reinald@nrw.social
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@cwebber @Colman @mirabilos @thomasjwebb I feel, modern "datacenter" started with HPC facilities: uniform structures, scaled up, energy consumption raised from few Kilowatt into Megawatt range.
(DIR) Post #B6OCxrOM32aP7th06K by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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@Reinald @cwebber @Colman @thomasjwebb yeah. My initial response was not detailled enough, I was thinking of deployments where you put the public-facing stuff into one, or even more than one to spread the risk, but do all the development, archiving, etc. in an in-house LAN.
(DIR) Post #B6ONSIwPBUQAnWm7Sy by AnachronistJohn@zia.io
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@cwebber And datacenters are overbuilt. If we didn’t literally cripple our residential Internet, we could run datacenters from home.I had a colo go out of business while in possession of my servers, so I ran a full time email server for a few hundred users out of a house. Between the UPS and the auto-start generator, power’s about as good as a datacenter’s. The weak point was that I had to route public, static IPs through a tunnel to another colocated machine. If residential and non-residential Internet didn’t have a literal order of magnitude or more price difference, I wouldn’t even need the other colocated machine.The point is that some of us are using the leftover crumbs of what datacenters are for because we have few other practical options. It sucks, and it’s sad. Now it seems likely that even those crumbs will be harder to find. It’s not a good direction.
(DIR) Post #B6OSl7YYEhwGlHPRD6 by AnachronistJohn@zia.io
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@cwebber Indeed! I have several issues with datacenters.First, using large amounts of water for cooling is NOT required. Evaporative cooling is NOT required. The fact that every so-called journalist writes about datacenter projects without calling out the megacorps who simply don’t want to pay for non-evaporative cooling just makes things worse.I have servers colocated in three different datacenters in three different US states. None use evaporative cooling. For years I had a quarter rack in a datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona, also without evaporative cooling. In Phoenix!Sure, people who like to make excuses for megacorps will say that high density compute like what AI companies want to build can’t be cooled without evaporation, but that’s simply not true. It can be done, but it costs much more, and AI companies don’t care about 10+ year ROI.The articles that don’t point out that all of these projects are bribing - er, negotiating cheaper power and water from municipal sources that are driving residential prices higher are doing everyone a disservice.All of this is one of many failings of capitalism. When a single corporate entity can demand so much of a service’s output that it can adversely shape the costs of basic, required services, there’s something wrong. The fact that there’s no governmental protections from this kind of abuse is highly problematic.It sure would be nice if journalists pointed out that the results of megadatacenters aren’t inevitable, but chosen based on how much hurt can be pushed on to everyone else.
(DIR) Post #B6OSl83kMitOK20Lpo by linear@nya.social
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@AnachronistJohn@zia.io @cwebber@social.coop this thread i started writing last night about second order water usage effects is relevant to this discussion and i would request that you read itRE: https://nya.social/notes/819e32f7ff2f9f5e2c93ffeb