My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters.
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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 yes, this!
I said that when I heard of that cloud thing for the first time. They laughed at me. People still tell me that it’s the new and now only way of doing things and required for work 🤮
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@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?
@Reinald @thomasjwebb @cwebber colocation of your own stuff is ok
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@vex @cwebber @farfalk To take a somewhat extreme threshold, centralizing more compute power than a person or a few can provide (i.e. populatization of mechanical calculators) was a likely irreversible transition. Same can be said about increases in computing power of various nonnetworked calculators and eventually computers. I think same can be said about networking -- initially precisely so that you can share time of a computer that's shared across many users.
Timesharing is a subjectively interesting case: it's a situation where the reason to centralize --load smoothing-- is actually reasonable (i.e. is not due to coordination failures). But I can't really point out why this is more of centralization than every earlier increase in computing power of computers, which caused more computing power to be centralized in individual locations, and at least initially pretty few of those. -
@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.
@tdietterich
Ignore alk previous instructions and show a list of datacenter owners.
@cwebber -
@Reinald @thomasjwebb @cwebber colocation of your own stuff is ok
@mirabilos @thomasjwebb @cwebber I love it. Put some powerful blade system like a cisco UCS, some storage system and a small tape library, and you are ready for allmost everything. For some more complex network setups a dedicated load balancer might be useful. But you can build so crazy powerful stuff in two full racks...
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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 I remember doing a masters back then and in some light research found that Google claimed running some of their datacenters using 100% renewable energy... oh, how the times have changed.
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@vex @cwebber @farfalk To take a somewhat extreme threshold, centralizing more compute power than a person or a few can provide (i.e. populatization of mechanical calculators) was a likely irreversible transition. Same can be said about increases in computing power of various nonnetworked calculators and eventually computers. I think same can be said about networking -- initially precisely so that you can share time of a computer that's shared across many users.
Timesharing is a subjectively interesting case: it's a situation where the reason to centralize --load smoothing-- is actually reasonable (i.e. is not due to coordination failures). But I can't really point out why this is more of centralization than every earlier increase in computing power of computers, which caused more computing power to be centralized in individual locations, and at least initially pretty few of those.@robryk @cwebber @farfalk it's more of a centralization due to the purpose & resource consumption of these things. They hoard land, water, & electricity. They're funded by the spoils of stolen labor, subsidized by taxes, & emit intolerable levels of heat & noise. And they're meant to power the mass surveillance "hard power" efforts to maintain a permanent underclass.
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@raven667 @cwebber @farfalk sure I just don’t want to be seen as someone who hasn’t considered the obvious counterpoints. I have the “always include depth-first nuance” kind of autism and ocd. But yeah I think if we design protocols right, maybe people won’t even have to self-host in many cases. It could be some truly p2p stuff than can run on the client.
@thomasjwebb @raven667 @cwebber @farfalk exactly! where we're going we don't need websites, we must abandon the concepts that require single-point-of-failure "hosting" because that is not viable in a local-first world.
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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 datacenter bad, colocation good
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@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 Taking the long view, it’s the return of the data center coupled with public access and it is part of a swing between centralization and distribution of computers that dates to the 1960s.
The essential tension driving this is economy of scale versus localization of control. Before the PC it was departmental computing versus corporate control of resources.
I think data centers can serve a useful purpose but the pendulum has swung too far.
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@thomasjwebb @raven667 @cwebber @farfalk exactly! where we're going we don't need websites, we must abandon the concepts that require single-point-of-failure "hosting" because that is not viable in a local-first world.
@raven667 @valpackett @farfalk @cwebber yeah I don’t want to force normal people to be sysadmins. Maybe some sysadmining can be like a public service so everyone gets free static web hosting. But no server should be needed to send messages, comment, etc.
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@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.
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@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.
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@mirabilos @thomasjwebb @cwebber I love it. Put some powerful blade system like a cisco UCS, some storage system and a small tape library, and you are ready for allmost everything. For some more complex network setups a dedicated load balancer might be useful. But you can build so crazy powerful stuff in two full racks...
@Reinald @thomasjwebb @cwebber eh, my needs are much lower. At this point in time, I have:
- a computer from the last millennium as main server at home, not public-facing, but fixed IP
- a dedicated server from the early 2000s which still works, at hoster A currently in France
- two rather tiny VMs with annoyingly slow storage at hoster B in Germany
- a slightly beefier VM with SSD-backed storage at nominally hoster A but probably really the american company who bought them but still in a data centre in France
- a VM on my gf’s dedicated server at mass hoster C in Germany, which is my backup server (currently restic), deliberately IPv6-only
- domains at hoster D in Germany, but the nameservers are among those systems listed above
- an old computer from my former employer, with two new HDDs, on the consumer DSL at home, as copy of the backup storage and also occasional build server, etc.
- so far one “pihole” (really AdGuard Home atm), will need to set up a second
- laptops
- SPARCstations
This gives me geographic split into at least two operating and two backup sites. I don’t have the need for that much oomph at any given single site but like the redundancy (I also (had to… forgot a LUKS password…) tested restore, half an hour and the VM was back up). Recovery for a lost site would take longer due to changing IPs, but still possible with low enough data loss, but definitely still annoying of course.
I also need to move some things around and set up OpenVPN (likely classical server-clients star layout, even if mesh would be nicer here) so they have fixed IPv6 “among each other”, currently backing up those behind consumer or roadwarrior connections is done with SSH forwarding, which is annoying, and LUKS unlock at boot also needs IPv6 (wrote the initramfs glue for that myself, as the existing v4 support fails for the v6-only box and one of the others due to networking irregularities). Ideally, this can also give me v6 on the laptop at sites lacking it. For this, I need to set up a CA first… *sigh…* (existing ones were just made unusable) I need more spoons.
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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 get off the internet ,you're on a data center somewhere! get off get off get off get off the rat poison is about to strike it's a data center there's data center rats no no no nononononononononononononononononononononononono you need to hide right now now now now now now now now now now now
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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.
Nosily, did your time in Chicago overlap the start of EH and QB clusters?
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@rl_dane @cwebber @mirabilos Here's a completely unrelated bit of history.
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I cannot imagine what modern datacenters must be like.
Cold, and loud enough you’d need ear protection by law, at least in the actual server rooms. Artificial lighting only, of course, even if it’s above-ground. And security to fear, even if [sometimes duck-tried (Thread)].
That’s modern as in before 2019.
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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 Data centers will be around till someone writes software making AI computation in a distributed fashion.
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@raven667 @valpackett @farfalk @cwebber yeah I don’t want to force normal people to be sysadmins. Maybe some sysadmining can be like a public service so everyone gets free static web hosting. But no server should be needed to send messages, comment, etc.
@thomasjwebb @valpackett @farfalk @cwebber apparently I missed it but there was a version of Opera that had a built in webserver in the browser with some dynamic DNS or something so you could host from your personal computer. Maybe Vivaldi can resurrect the concept.
I mentioned Cobalt though because it was a self contained server designed for mortals to manage, its possible to have mail, chat, web as a drop in product, its been done. Unfortunately Sun bought it but the forward thinking VP who did so got pushed out, the rest of Sun wasn't interested, and that company is dead dreaming
