Comment by concerndc1tizen
3 months ago
@railway
What would you say are your biggest threats?
Power seems to the big one, especially when the AI power and electric vehicle demand will drive up kWh prices.
Networking seems another one. I'm out of the loop, but it seems to me like the internet is still stuck at 2010 network capacity concepts like "10Gb". If networking had progressed as compute power has (e.g. NVMe disks can provide 25GB/s), 100Gb would be the default server interface? And the ISP uplink would be measured in terabits?
How is the diversity in datacenter providers? In my area, several datacenters were acquired and my instinct would be that: the "move to cloud" has lost smaller providers a lot of customers, and the industry consolidation has given suppliers more power in both controlling the offering and the pricing. Is it a free market with plenty of competitive pricing, or is it edging towards enshittification?
> Networking seems another one. I'm out of the loop, but it seems to me like the internet is still stuck at 2010 network capacity concepts like "10Gb". If networking had progressed as compute power has (e.g. NVMe disks can provide 25GB/s), 100Gb would be the default server interface? And the ISP uplink would be measured in terabits?
High end network interfaces are entering the 800Gbps interface era right now.
also, in 2010 10Gbps network connectivity to end hosts was NOT common. (it was common for router uplinks and interconnects though.
Network interfaces have not scaled as nicely because getting fast enough lasers to handle higher then 100Gbps has been a challenge, and getting to higher speeds basically means doing wave division multiplex over multiple channels across a single fiber.
Also, density of connections per fiber has increased massivly because the cost of DWDM equipment has come down significantly.