[AndrewMock]

Datacenter staffing in the cloud is fairly easy; only about 6 or so are needed on-prem for HVAC and hands-on. The rest are remote. Many cloud datacenters are able to be located in extremely obscure locations because of this.

[augustz]

GCP and AWS do not use 6 people per region.

With AWS a region has more than one availability zone.

aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region ap-south-1 for example shows two datacenters in mumbai.

Across physical site security, to power to network to just hard drive and system decommissioning, more than 6 staff.

I wonder if this is partly why AWS has done so well. I've used colo and hosted providers who do seem to have basically no one actually on site.

[matt_wulfeck]

Maybe double that number, or triple it. The point stands that you don’t need a large pool of local talent to operate a data center.

[ptman]

The Google data center in Hamina, Finland, statedly employs about 300. It's a mix of technical, security, catering and cleaning/facilities. Source (in Finnish): http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/google-ei-aio-laajentaa-da...