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by xoa 69 days ago
>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.

I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.

The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?

1 comments

I think it's a joke: you REALLY don't want to own your own servers.
I don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do want to own them. The people you rent yours from are making a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an idea
I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.

This includes things I have expertise in.

AWS is clearly not in a low-margin business, though.
you're going to save money by having your own physical servers?
Yes, a lot of money in fact.
The challenges of doing so are often significantly overstated. It can make a lot of sense to own them.
It sometimes makes financial sense to own your own servers
You do if you need absolute control over data location, isolation, and physical access.