| Yes, data centers are more complex than Nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants generally operate in well-known ways and with few unknown interactions. eg.
the work load on a nuclear power plant system does not spike around Christmas the work load on a nuclear power plant system does not change when there is a video spreading virally the nuclear power plant control system does not have to support a diverse eco-system of clients, some of them running hostile code. the nuclear power plant control system does not need to be upgraded very often Modern data centres and the infrastructure that runs on them operate in an environment of constant flux, this makes them vastly more complicated than a nuclear power plant system. Nuclear power plants have a vast number of components and a few very catastrophic failure modes but in essence they're very simple. The components don't change (save for the well known ways in which metal degrades under neutron bombardment), and lots of money has been invested to know exactly how these components act under various stresses. The engineers who operate them operate the same system for years and years becoming experts on how their very well defined system operates and know intimately its exact failure modes, and have a SOP manual and various checklists to quickly pinpoint and eliminate problems. Nuclear power plants are also developed and operated under a very clear singly focused mandate: Prevent at any cost the Nuclear Power plant from entering a catastrophic failure mode. |