Comment by cryo32
1 month ago
Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.
You’re describing having a bunch of data centers in different location and enough redundancy. What makes you against data centers themselves? They are just a way to pool resources to benefit from economy of scale. They don’t have to be enormous
Centralised "economies of scale" mean consolidating risks into geographical and corporate ownership. I mean look at the current situation: that consolidation means there are a few corporate players, any of whom could just pull the plug on a huge amount of infrastructure in a war or other geopolitical mess.
Also we have a layer of abstraction above the datacentre now which is the cloud provider. And that does not necessarily (especially in our case) have an economic advantage. And it is again a single point of failure. One cloud provider compromise and the scope of compromise is across multiple datacentres and businesses and potentially national governments.
I'm suggesting bringing a lot of stuff back in house or within tens of thousands of small datacentres where there's a few racks max. And we keep our abstraction depth low.
I'd go as far as designing things to be permanently disconnected or just occasionally connected these days. Even single-user stuff reaches into clouds and datacentres when it doesn't need to.
Large domestic corporates pulling the plug in a war seems unlikely to impossible as wars tend to go with what are effectively command economies.
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For distributing having more data centers seems like a prerequisit to me.
One can argue about size etc, though.
You could have written exactly same thing about refineries - from Russian perspective the bigger refinery the bigger target for Ukrainians.