91–100 of 287 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Security reasons, I presume? Otherwise it would be trivial for an adversary to map out their resources by sampling VM rentals over a moderate time-period.
I’m very naive on the subject here - what advantage would this give someone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most. Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really…
The best part about adamantly making such a claim is that anybody who knows better also knows better than to break NDA and pull a Warthunder to prove that the CSPs do use colo facilities, so you're not going to get anyone who knows better to disagree with you and say AWS S3 or GCP compute is colo-ed at a specific colo provider.
Equinx is retail, with only a couple of exceptions, although I know they're trying to grow the wholesale side.
This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks. https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox
https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/issues?q=is%3Aiss...
Note how they want to be "NetBox functions as the source of truth for your network infrastructure."
Your individual situation dictates what is important, but had netbox targeted being a central repository vs insisting on not allow other systems to be truthful for certain items it could be a different story.
We have learned that trying to centralize complexity and control doesn't work, heck we knew that almost immediately after the Clinger Cohen Act passed and even ITIL and TOGAF fully call this out now and I expect this to be targeted by consultants over the next few years.
You need a central constant way to find state, to remove any questions or doubt regarding where to find the authoritative information, but generally if you aspire to scale and grow or adapt to new changes you really need to avoid having some centralized, god-box, and prescriptive system like this.
Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?
> Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? The cynic in me says this was written by sales/marketing people targeted specifically at a whole new generation of people who've never laid hands on the bare metal or racked a piece of equipment or done low voltage cabling, fiber cabling, and "plug this into A and B power AC power" cabling. By this, I mean people who've never done anything that isn't GC…
When the original aws instance came out it would take you about two years or on demand to pay for the same hardware on prem. Now its between two weeks for ml heavy instances to six months for medium CPU instances.
It just doesn't make sence to use the cloud for anything past prototyping unless you want Bazos to have a bigger yacth.
Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?
It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1. Cloudflare has also…
cloud.google.com/about/locations lists all the locations that GCE offers service, which is a super set of the large facilities that someone would call a "Google Datacenter". I liked to mostly refer to the distinction as Google concrete (we built the building) or not. Ultimately, even in locations that are shared colo spaces, or rented, it's still Google putting custom racks there, integrating into the network and services, etc. So from a customer perspective, you should pick the right location for you. If that happens to be in a facility where Google poured the concrete, great! If not, it's not the end of the world.
P.S., I swear the certification PDFs used to include this information (e.g., https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/iso-27018?hl=en) but now these are all behind "Contact Sales" and some new Certification Manager page in the console.
Edit: Yes! https://cloud.google.com/docs/geography-and-regions still says:
> These data centers might be owned by Google and listed on the Google Cloud locations page, or they might be leased from third-party data center providers. For the full list of data center locations for Google Cloud, see our ISO/IEC 27001 certificate. Regardless of whether the data center is owned or leased, Google Cloud selects data centers and designs its infrastructure to provide a uniform level of performance, security, and reliability.
So someone can probably use web.archive.org to get the ISO-27001 certificate PDF from whenever the last time it was still up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1. Cloudflare has also…
The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most. Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really…
Cable management and standardization was extremely important (like you couldn't get by with shitty practices). At one place where we were deploying hundreds of servers per week, we had a menu of what ops people could choose if the server was different than one of the major clusters. We essentially had 2 chassis options, big disk servers which were 2u or 1u pizza boxes. You then could select 9/36/146gb SCSI drives. Everything was dual processor with the same processors and we basically had the bottom of the rack with about 10x 2u boxes and then the rest was filled with 20 or more 1u boxes.
If I remember correctly we had gotten such an awesome deal on the price for power, because we used facility racks in the cage or something, since I think they threw in the first 2x 30 amp (240v) circuits for free when you used their racks. IIRC we had a 10 year deal on that and there was no metering on them, so we just packed each rack as much as we could. We would put 2x 30s on one side and 2x 20s on another side. I have to think that the DC was barely breaking even because of how much heat we put out and power consumption. Maybe they were making up for it in connection / peering fees.
I can't remember the details, will have to check with one of my friends that worked there around that time.
Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories: - Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.) - Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but t…
> There was one day we knocked out windows and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire. Pointing the fans in or out?
LOL?