What do you suggest as an alternate solution to the problems data centers try to solve?

there is this character/mask of turin, part of the commedy of art, name is gianduia (which is also as gianduiotto a typical candy) ...

he is famous for hiding money in somebody elses pockets ...

i think of it every time i hear the word cloud ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianduja_(commedia_dell'arte)

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

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitdown_strike

Nosily, did your time in Chicago overlap the start of EH and QB clusters?

• 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.

There’s a difference between paying for a VM in a server rack and every server rack in a building the size of a city being a single VM, in essence, and in truth.

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.

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 🤮