
Infrastructure Pioneer Predicts Datacenter Days Are Numbered - Katydid
http://www.theplatform.net/2015/10/08/infrastructure-pioneer-predicts-datacenter-days-are-numbered/
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toomuchtodo
Just as we went through the outsourcing phase (with quite a bit of it being
brought back to the US), we'll go through the "outsource the datacenter"
phase.

The story of how GM outsourced/spun off its IT department and then brought it
all back in house once they realized it was a competitive advantage should be
required reading.

Aren't fads wonderful?

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besquared
This is more likely to be the case from the transition from independent power
generators to the electrical grid.

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toomuchtodo
I don't understand. Can you go into detail?

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JBReefer
Centralized operators have much better economies of scale and are able to
specialize in fields that are non-core to other industries, like security.

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toomuchtodo
That works because the power grid and power generators are heavily regulated
by the government. Is AWS ready to classify itself as a utility and be under
government regulation?

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rev_bird
That seems like an unreasonable jump to make. Building power plants doesn't
work ONLY because of a regulated energy market, though I'm sure it helps. What
if the parent commenter hadn't used a utility as an example? If the example of
"economies of scale" were ethanol fuel production, would you ask if AWS was
ready to classify itself as a corn field?

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martin1975
Maidsafe ... should be a solution to the datacenter problem. Ultimately we
want to aim for a completely decentralized/distributed internet where a
virtually infinite amount of available resources (CPU+storage+bandwidth) can
be summoned on demand from anyone participating in the network, -AND- expect
people to get paid for donating these resources. I remember an HN article like
a week or two ago on IPFS, another step in the right direction..

This will be the undoing of the datacenters - the problem is, there's ZERO
incentive for the millions of connected users to donate their resources and
unless this changes, the decentralized internet will remain a pipe dream.

The problem with Maidsafe is they've been working on it forever....

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nostrademons
...which is the problem with all completely-distributed, server-less Internet
schemes. Hell, I was working in this space when I was in college in 2002.
There were a lot of people interested in it then, probably even moreso than
now, and yet it was a complete tarpit that yielded very few long-lived results
(BitTorrent, basically - even Kazaa and the rest of the music filesharing apps
ended up getting replaced by centralized systems).

It's an area where I really wish _someone_ would succeed, but having worked on
some massively-distributed systems at Google in the intervening years, I'm
skeptical that it's possible.

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phantom_oracle
You know what the worse thing about this is?

It is that the momentum of this "put it in the cloud" will carry over to late-
comers like government/s, who will dump huge swaths of personal data that
should never sit in a "public-cloud" because even when the IT-sec guy warned
against it, some x-cloud-provider-sales-guy wooed the thick-headed upper-
aboves and then ... attacks on that "public-cloud" will become wholesale with
some script-kiddy (it could even be a 13 year old running a script) will then
have personally identifiable info of x-amount of citizens.

Managing infrastructure is a controllable-cost for any company, and if your
company is not doing it right, that should indicate a bigger inefficiency
problem in the organization (as a whole).

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angelbob
Most controllable costs get outsourced. It's not that everybody _can 't_ run
their own datacenter. It's that often it makes a lot of sense not to.

You're implicitly assuming that having not-terribly-tech-savvy organizations
(like governments) protect their _own_ data is somehow better.

In theory you could keep all the personal data not connected to the net at
all, in any way. In practice, before long nobody is going to do that except
extremely paranoid organizations like the NSA, CIA and military (and
equivalent non-US organizations.)

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username223
> You're implicitly assuming that having not-terribly-tech-savvy organizations
> (like governments) protect their own data is somehow better.

Quite often, it is. If all the data is in one place, the payoff for hacking it
is much greater than if each bit of data is on a different machine. As the man
said, "why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is."

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bowyakka
[https://www.stickermule.com/marketplace/3442-there-is-no-
clo...](https://www.stickermule.com/marketplace/3442-there-is-no-cloud)

