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Economics and scale can be a strange beast. The sum of Amazon EC2 + Google Cloud + Digital Ocean + Rackspace +... is about 10,000,000 servers, which makes... 1 server per 7,000 inhabitants on Earth. Have you ever looked at it this way? And that's only for public cloud, not including Facebook, Google's internal servers, Apple's infrastructure, ISPs, and servers hosted by all companies. So to provide all IT services to citizen of modern economies, we're certainly close to 1 server for 100 inhabitants. Sometimes I wonder what we're doing with so many servers on Earth: I don't spend 24hrs a day sending requests to public servers, and even if I did, the server I'd be pinging could handle a few thousand users at the same time. So where does all this processing power go? And there's even more computing available if you include everyone's home and work PC, phone and router, but those are not always-on. > Hmmm... perhaps everyone running their own system is, in fact, doable. Crunching the numbers, we're already above one system per person ;) So we might as well go full-decentralized, if we could conceive a theoretical model around it. |
Security, redundancy and isolation. Often times you have an extra server not because you need the processing power, but to separate things for security reasons, to provide failover and to avoid noisy neighbors.