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by jedberg 826 days ago
Unless you've worked at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, or a whole bunch of datacenter providers, I'm not sure how you could make that claim. They don't really share that information freely, even in their stock reports.

Heck I worked at Amazon and even then I couldn't tell you the total datacenter space, they don't even share it internally.
1 comments
virtuallynathan 826 days ago
You can just map them all... I have. I also worked at AWS :)
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chatmasta 826 days ago
This would be an interesting dataset to use for trading decisions (or sell to hedge funds).

But I wonder how much of their infrastructure is publicly mappable, compared to just the part of it that's exposed to the edge. (Can you map some internal instances in a VPC?)

That said, I'm sure there are a lot of side channels in the provisioning APIs, certificate logs, and other metadata that could paint a decently accurate picture of cloud sizes. It might not cover everything but it'd be good enough to track and measure a gradual expansion of capacity.

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virtuallynathan 825 days ago
I’m not sure mapping VPCs is super helpful - the physical infra is fairly distinct.

AWS has also disclosed 20 million Nitro adapters have been deployed, so you can do some backwards napkin math from that.

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the-rc 826 days ago
Mapping as in.. drawing the outlines of buildings and computing the square footage yourself?
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virtuallynathan 825 days ago
Yep.
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the-rc 825 days ago
Then you should be aware that, for the longest time, Google was against multiple floors, until they suddenly switched to four floors in many locations:

https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431213/sc...

A decade ago, there was a burst in construction and in some places the bottleneck was not getting the machines or electricity, but how fast they could deliver and pour cement, even working overnight.

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virtuallynathan 825 days ago
Yep, I am aware, I have a square footage multiplier for their multi-story buildings.
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jedberg 825 days ago
But how can you know how many floors they have? And where are you getting the list of buildings from? And what makes you think your list is complete?

Also how do you know their efficiency? Google might have less space but also a way to pack twice as much compute in the same place.

Like I said, this is impossible to know without a lot of insider information from a lot of companies.

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