Interesting, so this indicates digitalocean doesn't operate their own datacenters, but is a tenant in each location. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I assume AWS, GCP and Azure actually operate their own? What other cloud providers truly operate their own datacenters?
Some AWS, Azure and GCP availability zones run out of third party (at least Equinix) datacenters. It's easier and cheaper for the more "niche" regions - nobody will use the Paris region outside of customers in and around France, does it make sense to build and operate 3 DCs for such a market? Apparently AWS decided that it doesn't and they use Equinix PA2 and PA3, among others, for that.
> nobody will use the Paris region outside of customers in and around France, does it make sense to build and operate 3 DCs for such a market? Apparently AWS decided that it doesn't and they use Equinix PA2 and PA3, among others, for that.
There may be something else to it... they are launching a Spain region [1] this year with three data centers. My guess is that it will be both heavily subsidized and much cheaper to operate than a similar project in France.
I think it might also be, that if you are a company working on public sector projects, servers being within the country is required or preferred to win the contracts.
Haven't been in this space in a long time, but when I did work on such projects in Switzerland mid 2000s having anything outside the country would at least raise eyebrows. Back then we had to run most things on-premise, but from what I have heard, they opened up to the cloud to a degree.
See also the tags of the article "[...] Education, Government, Healthcare, Nonprofit, Public Sector, [...]"
Equinix doesn't own many of the buildings they have facilities in. Aside from Dallas Infomart, I don't really know of any where they do, but I do know many buildings they have facilities in that they don't own. Digital Realty much more commonly owns carrier hotel buildings.
The hyperscale cloud providers are so big that they need to self host to reduce power consumption. They also use alot of custom designed parts to maximize cooling and power efficiency — at the cost of inflexibility. The overhead of being a tenant in a multi-tenant data center is too much.
A smaller provider usually sees a financial advantage to lease or build traditional datacenter space. “Smaller” can be quite large… I worked with an enterprise team that built out a large private data center circa 2015. Something on the order of low six figure server count. At that time the dollars worked out to build vs. cloud, mostly due to security control requirements. YMMV.
“self host to reduce power consumption” isn’t entirely accurate, even within a leased environment at Equinix or using a typical ‘powered shell’ provider like Sabey, the larger providers will still be customizing heavily many aspects downstream of the switchgear (and that’s where some but not all of these efficiencies can be located).
Tidbits from Peter Desantis’ keynotes and before that James Hamilton at re:Invent indicate that like Meta, Amazon doesn’t use 19” form-factor racks, has in-rack UPS solutions, DC power delivery and a sled-based server architecture. All these videos are on YouTube and the last 3-4 years (2018 onward) are really interesting and worth watching.
I’m short I’d guess Amazon and others partnerships with Equinix (and equivalents) are about two things: time to market, and some markets not being worth the investment [1] to drop 3x 30MW facilities into.
A large number of cloud providers will likely have a blend of their own datacenters as well as installations within other providers' centers. I've been in that data center at 200 Paul Ave in San Francisco, back in early 2010, and can confirm that at the time, it definitely had multiple floors' worth of racked, running equipment owned by Facebook, despite them already having their own data centers at that point.
Owning real estate simply isn‘t their main business purpose and has many downsides, especially in matters of scalability. The main pro reason for owning them is cost. Owning the buildings makes you less flexible but saves you money in the long-term.
One more point in favor of leasing is: the relevant „neighbors“ are just next door. If you own the real estate, it‘s probably in the middle of nowhere, network-wise, and you end up spending lots on laying fibre. Whereas with leased space, other providers are likely on the same campus and all you need is a few 100 meter or one km of fibre to reach the next building or even just the next room. If you are small enough, these savings on connectivity can even end up making it cheaper to lease.
Might be a surprise to many, but it‘s primarily the budget providers (Hetzner and OVH) that own their own buildings.
Most others just have long-term leases with whoever owns the real estate (usually Equinix or Interxion/Digital Realities, as they more or less own most big DCs around the globe).
Also, I guess many miss-understand what „not own the DC“ really means. These services aren‘t the kind of retail-style colocation offers. Those providers rent entire rooms or even buildings there, run their own infrastructure in them and frequently have their own staff and offices on site too. These lease agreements behave more like a usual office or warehouse lease, not what some here might think.
I don't know of many with the cash to actually build and operate their own DCs? I don't think it's financially viable to do so, it's better to just rent part of one?
Its pretty common knowledge, they talk about it on their blog too. We’re very happy with DO; Support is very easy to reach, prices are reasonable, downtime has been acceptable for the price.
I don’t really see operating your own data center as a GOOD thing. These professional data center providers serve 911 and financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat pictures. The later considers their consumers cattle for the slaughter, while these professional colo providers don’t have that conflict of interest.
> These professional data center providers serve 911 and financial clients, while gcp/aws serve selfies and cat pictures. The later considers their consumers cattle for the slaughter, while these professional colo providers don’t have that conflict of interest.
It's kinda silly to suggest nothing important runs on aws/gcp, there's plenty of huge businesses running on them, with equally large legal departments ready to string amazon/google up by the balls if they breach the terms of their contracts around SLAs etc.
AWS/GCP are pretty much as good as anyone reliablity-wise, as long as your product is multi-AZ etc.
But SLAs are a joke - your business should be making $100 for every $1 you spend on compute, the fact they'll refund your $1 is trivial compared to your $100 loss.
I mean, they're an infrastructure company, not an insurance company. If your power goes out, you don't get compensated for the $1M deal you would have closed if only your lights were on. If it's that important, you have a backup.
I think the reality is that if stores are closed or websites are down, people will just come back later. Maybe not so much for ad serving (if you're bored at work and Reddit is down, you're not going to make time after work to go view ads there), but for actual businesses, it might not be as big a problem as people would like to imagine. But if it is, that's why you can spend millions on a multi-cloud solution.
A professional datacenter provider, Equinix, provided one year notice for a datacenter closing (PA1). AWS would never do anything like that to their customers.
If I have equipment in a datacentre like Equinix, I likely also have circuits (with minimum terms), network equipment and servers (physical devices) that I need to manage and consider how to physically relocate.
When I have a service with AWS, I have software I need to relocate.
The needs and constraints of relocating software from 1000 servers is very very different to the needs and constraints of relocating 25 racks of equipment.
Unless you have 1000 AWS ‘pets’ instead of ‘cattle’, in which case you’ll wish you could just lift-and-shift.
TL;DR it depends on the use case, but I'd expect everyone in the top 5-8 cloud providers to own and operate at least some of their own facilities. But everyone is going to have some space in a collocation facility.
There are various degrees of "operate your own datacenter" in the datacenter market.
A lot of facilities on this list, like Equinix, are retail datacenters. They have things like 24/7 "smart hands" who you can call to go repair a server, replace or move a networking cable, things like that. These are the most full service options. They also offer various network connectivity products, and if you are willing to pay for it, you could go as far as ship them servers or a rack and have them do much of the install for you. These are the most expensive options, but, at least in the case of Equinix they also typically have the best network connectivity. This is your typical collocation, or even carrier hotel.
So if you go into an Equinix facility in a lot of markets you will see everyone with racks or cages full of equipment in there. Though the biggest players are mostly going to use them for network POPs and maybe something like a CDN node. So you might see Amazon CloudFront equipment in there, but not much else.
Often the thing to do is put your public internet connectivity, peering, and perhaps backbone links in a well connected place like this, but the bulk of your compute is in a much larger and cheaper facility elsewhere.
There are also retail collocation facilities that aren't super well connected (when I say well connected I mean you can get access to 10s or 100s of providers just by being in that facility) and those are a lot cheaper than Equinix, and often full service. They tend to cater to smaller customers. Though I've seen Akamai have a ton of racks in some surprisingly crappy faculties.
Then DRT (Digital Reality Trust) operates more in the wholesale datacenter market. They can rent cages for multiple racks, but are even more used to renting out whole datahalls, so you have dedicated space. In a lot of areas they can't really offer things like 24/7 smart hands. They aren't going to handhold you nearly as much, and space and power tends to be a lot cheaper, but your minimum buy is going to be a lot larger. 20-100 racks maybe?
CoreSite kind of straddles the line between Retail and Wholesale. They offer a lot of full service stuff, but can also rent you out a whole data hall or even building at a campus if you need it. No one would ever confirm this, but I'm pretty sure one of the big 3 cloud providers has a big chunk of, the CoreSite Silicon Valley campus. If you search Google Maps for core site silicon valley you'll see a cluster of about 5 buildings, all labeled. One building right there is suspiciously unlabeled, but if you do the the Satellite view, it's clearly a datacenter.
Take it another step, and you have companies like Sabey who offer a datacenter shell. Basically a building with power, generators, etc, but you do everything else, or they customize it to your specs and help operate it. Yet again cheaper per unit of compute you are doing, but a lot high minimum spend to make sense. You'll probably be measuring things in MW (megawatts) before you are looking at something like this. Sabey also sells to retail datacenters. I spent far too much time at the Sabey Tukilla campus south of Seattle from 2009 - 2011 in an Internap facility. I had to go through Sabey security to get into the building, and then Internap security to get into their space. Most everything inside that space was taken care of by Internap (now seemingly branded INAP).
Then you have build and operate your own datacenter, which also has various degrees. I don't know how it works now, but I know a few years back AWS had (has) a TON of buildings in the Ashburn Virginia area that are us-east-1. I was told by someone who worked in datacenter real estate that they typically would buy the land and get a datacenter shell built, then sell it to another operator and lease it back. Then bring in all their own power and compute.
I also heard that a few years ago when Oracle was building out their cloud, they were just buying up all the retail datacenter space they could so they could get to market faster. They were paying an arm and a leg for it, but that was the fastest way to get online.
So the economics of all this depend on what you are doing, why you have the space, and how much actual equipment you need in there. At smaller scales, say a CDN, or just networking equipment, it often makes the most sense to just lease retail space. At larger and larger scales it makes more and more sense to in-house more of it.
I've never worked at one of the large cloud providers, but I'd expect they have some smaller regions that are retail or wholesale datacenters operated by another provider. But the large regions are mostly owned and operated.
