
How Many Data Centers Needed World-Wide - melqdusy
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/how-many-data-centers-needed-world-wide/
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boulos
Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud.

This is a great post! One logical nit though is that just because Netflix (and
YouTube) have ~1000 edge locations doesn't actually imply that the world needs
that many "medium to large data centers" (with large at presumably 30MW).

The number of world-scale massive _bandwidth_ applications is pretty low.
There are so many humans, they're only watching so much video, etc. and that's
why Netflix and YouTube before them are at your ISP. Online gaming would be
another such example, but would again be served by the minimal number for
_latency_ not bandwidth (this depends on your opinion of the relative
popularity of gaming versus media consumption).

The regulatory / data locality angle is more likely to be the main driver for
needing more data centers beyond the latency requirements. Otherwise, most
customers just don't have the bandwidth requirements to necessitate a large
facility.

Again, Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

