Where Are Amazon's Data Centers? Once in a while. For an interminable period of torture (usually about 1- 3 hours, tops) there is no Instagram to browse, no Tinder to swipe, no Github to push to, no Netflix to And Chill. When this happens, it usually means that Amazon Web Services is having a technical problem, most likely in their US- East region.
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What that actually means is that something is broken in northern Virginia. Of all the places where Amazon operates data centers, northern Virginia is one of the most significant, in part because it.
It seemed appropriate that this vision quest to see The Cloud across America which began at the ostensible birthplace of the Internet should end at the place that. For the notoriously economical and utilitarian Amazon, this meant that it could quickly set up shop with minimal overhead in the area, leasing or buying older data centers rather than building new ones from scratch. The ease with which AWS was able to get off the ground by leasing colocation space in northern Virginia in 2. US- East is the most fragile molecule of the AWS cloud: it.
When I contacted AWS to ask specific questions about the data- center region, how they ended up there, and the process of deciding between building data centers from scratch versus leasing existing ones, they declined to comment. Unlike Google and Facebook, AWS doesn. My itinerary was a slightly haphazard one, based on looking for anything tied to Vadata, Inc., Amazon. My weird hack research methods returned a handful of Vadata addresses scattered throughout the area: Ashburn, Sterling, Haymarket, Manassas, Chantilly. Before I knew northern Virginia as the heart of the Internet, I knew it as spook country. After missing an exit in Mc. Lean, I made a U- turn in a generically designed but improbably well- guarded office- park entrance that I later found out was the headquarters of the Office of the Directorate for National Intelligence.
Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country. The company powers much of the Internet, but its cloud facilities are difficult to find.
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The fact that northern Virginia is home to major intelligence operations and to major nodes of network infrastructure isn. To explain why a region surrounded mostly by farmland and a scattering of American Civil War monuments is a central point of Internet infrastructure, we have to go back to where a lot of significant moments in Internet history take place: the Cold War. Today, up to 7. 0 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region.
Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the military- industrial complex. While suburbs were largely marketed to the public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured . Highways both facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget that the legislation that funded much of the U. S. This led to an outcropping of office parks that housed not only defense contractors, but also government IT and time- sharing services and, later, companies like MCI, AOL, and UUNet. Thanks to that concentration of network companies and a whole lot of support from the National Science Foundation, Tysons Corner became home to MAE- East, one of the earliest Internet exchanges and home to the foundation of what would become that Internet backbone.
Networks build atop networks, and the presence of this backbone in Tysons Corner led to more backbone, more tech companies, and more data centers. Today, up to 7. 0 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region, as the Loudon county economic- development board cheerfully notes in its marketing materials. An unfathomable amount of that traffic is from AWS.
In 2. 01. 2, a now- lost blog post by network- intelligence startup Deep. Field estimated that on average, one- third of all daily Internet usage accesses a site running on AWS.
Over the last three years, that percentage has most likely only increased. Finding more recent numbers is tricky, although it seems agreed upon that Amazon is the largest hosting company operating today, projected to exceed $8 billion this year alone. While this exact calculation of how much of the Internet sits within Amazon.
The solution was to make that build- up of the basic development infrastructure something that could be rapidly deployed and scaled as needed. AWS emerged out of the recognition that the services Amazon needed also met a growing industry need for web- scale application infrastructure. Reporting on AWS history rarely spends much time on the data centers themselves.
The actual infrastructure at the heart of AWS. So it made sense that when I stood outside some of the Vadata buildings from my hackish itinerary that I mostly gazed upon warehouses and vacuous- looking colocation buildings. Ingrid Burrington. I had a soft spot for one of the data centers on my itinerary: a building in Sterling, Virginia, that I. The data center is next door to a pet resort (which always fills me with a weird glee imagining the secretly very stressful life of pets implied in the need for a resort) and down the road from a strip mall. The sheer unremarkability of the building. As soon as the electric- power grid came online, they dumped their electric- power generator, and they started buying power off the grid.
It just makes more sense. Thanks to AWS, the initial overhead for starting a service like Airbnb or Slack (both AWS customers) is so low that those companies can afford to expand quickly. A fenced- off data center next to a pet resort doesn't exactly scream . Earlier this year, an under construction AWS data center in Ashburn caught fire. Conveniently, the exact address was included in the story. This apparently not- yet- operational AWS data center is across the street from Ashby Ponds, a retirement community, and adjoins an area dominated by office parks, other data centers, and construction sites.
It shared some familiar tropes of the region. Due to SEC regulations COPT hasn. COPT only got into the data- center business a few years ago after focusing most of their efforts on building and managing office parks for defense contractors next to military outposts. While the CIA contract and the COPT deal are probably unrelated, given COPT's history in facilitating the construction of facilities secured to Do. D specs, the data center might be part of an expansion of AWS.
Its neighbors included a wholesale brick supplier, a gutter- supply company, and a Virginia Department of Transportation vehicle- maintenance outpost. This is why in its early years Bezos aggressively poached new hires from America's original logistics- disguised- as- retail business, Walmart (I. In part, the success of Amazon Web Services. And for a long time, Amazon has been able to abstract away a lot of the more discomforting or difficult facets of its infrastructure. In the case of Amazon. In the case of AWS, it might be the energy use of its data centers.
When Bezos compares cloud infrastructure to the power grid, he obscures the fact that data centers aren. Although the company pledged earlier this year to move to entirely renewable energy, Greenpeace has previously referred to AWS as the least transparent of all major tech companies on carbon footprint and energy use. In some ways this is why, despite the fact I know that I. At this point, it is easier to use the data points that slip through the cracks to find an Amazon data center in the heart of spook country than it is to actually understand in any sort of granular detail how much of the internet currently lives on Amazon Web Services or how serious of an environmental impact Amazon Web Services has. A now- lost blog post estimated that on average, one- third of all daily Internet usage accesses a site running on Amazon Web Services. The incoherent banality of northern Virginia also felt like a fitting aesthetic conclusion to this journey to see the cloud.
If driving across America in search of the Internet has taught me anything, it. It is a misunderstanding that hinges on a weird, sad, very human hope that history might actually end, or at least reach some kind of perfect equipoise in which nothing terrible could ever happen again. As though if we could only collate and collect and process and store enough data points, the world.
The Internet is a beautiful, terrible, fraught project of human civilization. While I make light of language like.