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My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters. 2005-2007, I was a datacenter assistant monkey working from Google working somewhere in the Chicago suburbs, swapping out hard drives and ram and writing shell scripts, as myself and my friends unknowingly laid down the prototype for the kinds of datacenters we all see today.
And so it is with some significant expertise that I say:
Fuck datacenters. Datacenters are an anti-pattern.
@cwebber
huh
interesting.
about that same time;
had 3 interviews with the goog
as a 'linux beige box wrangler'
at a big campus dc in northern va
my linux clue-kit was deep & shallow at the same time
they passed me over
I was bummed, bigly
then it all changed
@cwebber The main motivations for using data centers are security, reliability, flexibility, and efficiency. A data center can manage power consumption much better than your typical on premises installation. Infrastructure can be shared by many users, which allows dynamic scaling without having to over provision on premises. It also allows users to share expert reliability and cybersecurity engineers.
@cwebber I agree with your premise. However, realistically, convincing businesses to return to on-prem is challenging. It's not just about management – maintaining, securing, and procuring on-prem hardware is a significant expense and effort compared to provisioning cloud resources.
MSPs could help, but even with their assistance, the ongoing costs and complexity often favor cloud-native solutions.
How do you think we could convince small business owners to move from Shopify for example?
@cwebber At the moment we ended up with a phone that could do most of what we wanted, but had no agency over, at the backend there was the datacenter explosion, which we had no agency over. Now you can't even buy a laptop anymore because the datacenter explosion caused scarcity of its components. Check mate.
Working in that environment, seeing as Google rolled out the idea of "cloud computing" meaning "you have no involvement or agency in your computing because we do it for you" radicalized me for much of the work of my career.
It was one thing to run a datacenter to index the world's public web information. I understood that, it made sense.
But watching as Google and Apple co-developed the idea that computers, which I cared about, got abstracted into toys and jewelry that had all your key computing done in a way you had no agency over... where I saw firsthand the kinds of churn of resources necessary to keep these things going, it made me want to fight for a different computing future.
@cwebber
The core problem is not AI, cloud, or interfaces.
The real problem is ambiguous and centrally controlled information.
Without deterministic foundations, civilization will keep scaling dependency, manipulation, and chaos.
CTMinfo is the first real attempt to solve this at the root.
@cwebber do you have a writeup expanding on “datacenters are an anti-pattern” because this is 100% how I feel. I’m not fighting over AI. I’m still fighting over the cloud. Society has badly fumbled the fact that everyone has incredible computing power in their pocket. We’ve already been wasting electricity on idle servers and inefficient high level code. I’ve been - and am - part of the problem, moving functionality to the cloud for business reasons I hate.
@thomasjwebb I've been meaning to write a blogpost for a long time. Sounds like it's time to write it!
@cwebber @thomasjwebb I remember "datacenter" starting as "colocation hoster" - you rentet rackspace or several racks with redundant power supply, internet link, packed in some pizzaboxes and a router, and there you go. Physical safety was better than the rack with dev servers in the basement, so what else could you ask for?
@cwebber that's an interesting point of view. I mean, of course the current data center craze is complete madness, but it seems you consider an anti-pattern the concept of data center itself. Why is it so? What do you suggest as an alternate solution to the problems data centers try to solve?
@farfalk Datacenters are concentrations of power. Anytime a datacenter is involved, it's a sign of power centralization. The rise of datacenters corresponds with the death of p2p and other visions of a more decentralized internet.
@cwebber @farfalk like, I can appreciate some of the advantages of having them. Like you could get more computer per watt, maybe. I think valuable research is done with supercomputers and modern, more modular approaches to big data. But we could do way more with way fewer datacenters if these weren't used as a way to paywall functionality at the server side. The move to the cloud almost makes me miss when my problem was Cubase requiring a USB dongle.
@cwebber @farfalk I think it more corresponds to the death of personal computing as it was? People don't have desktops anymore and barely have laptops other than for work? Which is a problem for p2p? Seems like most people's decentralized/federated nodes for things are hosted in data centers? All question marks because just speculating.
@johns @cwebber @farfalk it's telling that hardware for user-controlled computing is disappearing. Memory and storage are disappearing from the market and it feels *intentional*. https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business
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