[cryo32]

Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.

[dgellow]

You’re describing having a bunch of data centers in different location and enough redundancy. What makes you against data centers themselves? They are just a way to pool resources to benefit from economy of scale. They don’t have to be enormous

[cryo32]

Centralised "economies of scale" mean consolidating risks into geographical and corporate ownership. I mean look at the current situation: that consolidation means there are a few corporate players, any of whom could just pull the plug on a huge amount of infrastructure in a war or other geopolitical mess.

Also we have a layer of abstraction above the datacentre now which is the cloud provider. And that does not necessarily (especially in our case) have an economic advantage. And it is again a single point of failure. One cloud provider compromise and the scope of compromise is across multiple datacentres and businesses and potentially national governments.

I'm suggesting bringing a lot of stuff back in house or within tens of thousands of small datacentres where there's a few racks max. And we keep our abstraction depth low.

I'd go as far as designing things to be permanently disconnected or just occasionally connected these days. Even single-user stuff reaches into clouds and datacentres when it doesn't need to.

[RandomLensman]

Large domestic corporates pulling the plug in a war seems unlikely to impossible as wars tend to go with what are effectively command economies.

[cryo32]

It's not just pulling the plug. It's serious economic disparity between regions and legally mandated espionage as well.

[RandomLensman]

If the EU had own large corporate hyperscalers that would be an issue there for the EU?

[cryo32]

Yes it would still. Which is why I think the process is misguided. I mean look at Hungary which was a near miss. It needs to be resilient to state failure as well.

This means that the entire idea of a corporate EU spanning hyperscaler should never exist.

[johannes1234321]

For distributing having more data centers seems like a prerequisit to me.

One can argue about size etc, though.

[general1465]

You could have written exactly same thing about refineries - from Russian perspective the bigger refinery the bigger target for Ukrainians.