
Google Cloud Platform Launches Northern Virginia Region - jpatokal
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Google-Cloud-Platform-launches-Northern-Virginia-region.html
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yeukhon
Why Ashburn:

According to [1]:

"Ashburn is the Internet’s boom town. It sits atop the world’s densest
intersection of fiber networks, making it an ideal location to store and
distribute data. .... It was home to MAE-East, the Internet’s first major
interconnection point. A startup called Equinix built its first data center in
Ashburn in 1998, providing a “carrier-neutral” facility where companies’
networks could tap into Internet backbones."

[2] describes trend for Y16, Y17. Worth a read. I was told by my SVP about his
visit of Boston and he said Boston also hosts some of the major financial and
entertainment businesses (e.g Netflix? I thought they shut down their own DC
already) for Boston is also atop of major Internet backbone. I didn't verify
this claim yet.

[1]: [http://datacenterfrontier.com/the-ashburn-data-center-
buildi...](http://datacenterfrontier.com/the-ashburn-data-center-building-
boom-hits-new-heights/)

[2]: [http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-
North-...](http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-North-
America-Data-Center-Outlook-2016-JLL.PDF)

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empath75
I live in ashburn. The rate at which they are building datacenter here is
unreal. I have a 5 minute commute to the office and I drive past two new data
centers and 4 more under construction. Pretty much anywhere that there is open
space, they're building another one, or planning to.

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yeukhon
How does it affect the environment, despite their efforts to keep heat and CO2
emission as low as possible? How's the wild life there?

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thejosh
Really looking forward to AU GCP!

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spullara
Hopefully it is as reliable as us-east-1. /s

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alexkon
Is Google’s us-east-1 unreliable? Would you mind to share any details?

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pharrlax
Employee of an AWS customer here hosted primarily on us-east-1.

We've had a box get water damage after a big storm.

Also, I once met someone who works at the datacenter. He said it's crazy hot
inside. They apparently only cool the building the bare minimum required to
keep the servers functional. Very Amazon.

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koolba
I recall reading a google study that disks last longer and are more stable
running hotter than usual.

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l1n
"After looking at data on over 34,000 drives, I found that overall there is no
correlation between temperature and failure rate."

From BackBlaze: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-
does-i...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-
matter/)

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ImJasonH
Added this to [http://www.gcping.com/](http://www.gcping.com/) and it's
currently my nearest/fastest region, from NYC.

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puzzle
This is funny. Google used to have clusters in Virginia. Not in Ashburn, but
close, in a colo facility. You wanted to use them if you cared about latency
to e.g. Philly, NYC and Boston. Then they were turned down because of all the
capacity that was brought up on the East Coast in its own facilities.

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bane
Imagine that, a PaaS offering served out of the location where 70% of the
world's entire internet traffic goes through, in a location drowning in
technical talent and with one of the largest possible consolidated customer
bases on the planet.

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lihan
Waiting for their services in Australia!

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DanCarvajal
The Federal Government region is what I think they mean.

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HappyTypist
Perfect region for the NSA to make use of GCP!

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sillysaurus3
Did anything ever come of that movement to write an open source software
license like "Anyone can use this, except the NSA"? It was a briefly-popular
idea in 2013 or so.

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meddlepal
Good luck enforcing that or finding out if the NSA is using your software.
It's just a silly idea.

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sillysaurus3
Probably, though it came about after finding out the NSA uses Sinatra, so it's
not entirely impossible.

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vacri
But North Virginia is where datacenters have the most instability! AWS has
shown that...

