Growth Driving Data Center Expansion Plans
Even without the exact numbers, that’s an indicator of how rapidly Amazon’s infrastructure is growing, and why the company has recently began acquiring additional sites in Ireland, northern Virginia and Oregon for data center expansion.
In his research at Microsoft and now at Amazon Web Services, Hamilton has focused on cost models for operating hyper-scale data centers. His presentation at the Amazon open house reviewed cost assumptions for an 8 megawatt data center, which could include 46,000 servers.
Hamilton estimated the cost at $88 million , and presented a pie chart outlining monthly operating costs for a facility, which is dominated by the cost for servers , followed by power and cooling and electric power .
These percentages are consistent with Hamilton’s earlier published research on data center costs. His example assumes power costs of roughly 7 cents per kilowatt hour and a Power Usage Effectiveness , which both suggest that the example data center is a composite of Amazon’s global footprint rather than its best-performing data center.
Digital Infrastructure Supporting Hyperscale Cloud Platforms
The most important trend that is re-shaping the data center industry is the movement of computing resources and workloads to the cloud. Specifically, these workloads are moving to public cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services , Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, and Tencent. Adoption of public cloud services is growing because of the economic rationale for a number of different workloads. Considerations for public cloud adoption include cost, speed, ease of use, ubiquity, and scalability, all of which the public cloud offers.
Cloud service providers are placing the on-ramps to their services in existing network nodes and architecting their networks and compute or storage nodes around them. These on-ramps are being placed in facilities owned by the largest data center providers including Equinix, CoreSite, and Digital Realty, which have a focus on interconnection. This phenomenon can be explained in greater detail, with a case study using Amazon Web Services .
Aws To Open Data Centers In Switzerland
New AWS Infrastructure Region will arrive in the second half of 2022, enabling customers to run workloads and store data in Switzerland while serving end users with even lower latency
SEATTLE , an company , today announced it will open an infrastructure region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022. The AWS Europe Region will comprise three Availability Zones and join existing regions in France , and the UK . Currently, AWS provides 77 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions globally, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Switzerland . The new AWS Europe Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in Switzerland . For more information, visit: .
“For more than 14 years, AWS has supported organizations across almost every industry in Switzerland to speed up innovation, lower their IT costs, and transform their operations, said Peter DeSantis , Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services, Inc. AWS is excited to announce our upcoming region in Switzerland and help Swiss institutions, innovative startups, and world-leading pharma companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country.
Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Europe Region
Investing in Switzerlands Future
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Wikileaks Publishes The Location Of Amazons Data Centers
The controversial publisher WikiLeaks has released what it calls a highly confidential internal document from the cloud computing provider . The document is from late 2015, and lists the addresses and some operational details of more than 100 AWS data centers spread across 15 cities in nine countries.
According to the Amazon Atlas document, Amazon operates in 38 facilities in Northern Virginia, eight in San Francisco, eight in Seattle, and seven in Oregon. In Europe it has seven data centers in Dublin, Ireland, four in Germany, and three in Luxembourg. In the Asia-Pacific region it has 12 data centers in Japan, nine in China, six in Singapore, and eight in Australia. It also has six sites in Brazil.
Amazon, which is the largest cloud provider, is notoriously secretive about the precise locations of its data centers, according to WikiLeaks. While a few are publicly tied to Amazon, this is the exception rather than the norm. More often, Amazon operates out of data centers owned by other companies with little indication that Amazon itself is based there too.
WikiLeaks says that to maintain secrecy, Amazon often runs data centers under less-identifiable subsidiaries such as VaData, and in some cases Amazon uses pseudonyms to obscure its presence.
Some of this information has undoubtedly changed since the Atlas document was published in 2015. Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment for this story.
Which Business Has One Of The Most Data On The Planet
Oracle is the most significant gamer in the Big Data location, it is likewise popular for its front runner data source. Oracle leverages the advantages of large data in the cloud. It aids companies to specify its data approach and also technique that includes large data and also cloud modern technology.
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Amazons Data Center Offensive Continues In Worlds Largest Market
Amazon doesnt appear to be slowing down data center construction in 2020 as the public cloud giant is buying more land in northern Virginia.
Amazon spent hundreds of millions last year in expanding its data center presence in northern Virginia, the worlds hottest data center market. In 2020, the public cloud titan doesnt appear to applying the brakes on data center spending.
Amazon subsidiary Amazon Data Services recently bought 100 acres of land for $73 million in Chantilly, Virginia, which was first reported by the Washington Business Journal. Northern Virginia is home to Amazon Web Services largest data center hub in the globe with a total of six AWS availability zones in the region.
Northern Virginia houses more than 100 data centers and is strategically located near Washington, D.C. A large percentage of the worlds internet traffic flows through the region, which has witnessed a giant data center boom over the past several years thanks to cloud services providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft spending billions on buying land to build hyperscale data centers on.
Although ground will likely not be broken in Chantilly, Virginia, this year, Amazon is already in the process of constructing new hyperscale data centers in northern Virginia in 2020. Amazon did not respond for comment by press time.
Aws To Launch First Data Centre Region In New Zealand By 2024
The new AWS New Zealand region will be part of a NZ$7.5 billion, 15-year investment in the country.
Amazon Web Services has announced plans to launch its first data centre region in New Zealand by 2024, as part of a NZ$7.5 billion investment strategy in the country over the next 15 years.
To be based in Auckland, the data centre cluster will feature three availability zones. These will join the existing 81 availability zones that exist globally in 25 geographic regions.
Globally, AWS has announced plans for 24 more availability zones and eight more AWS regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.
AWS has been operating in New Zealand for the last eight years.
New Zealand public sector country manager Tim Dacombe-Bird claims the investment would deliver 1,000 new jobs and contribute NZ$10.8 billion to the country’s GDP over the next 15 years.
“This is AWS’s largest investment than New Zealand today. It will unleash further innovation, drive greater productivity, increase our skilled workforce, and truly position New Zealand at the forefront of digital commerce,” he said.
AWS will offer its core functionality services to start, and this will be built on over time.
“And they can do this knowing that we are committed to providing the highest standard of privacy and security protections.”
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Amazon Building Data Center In The Greater Zurich Area
Zurich – Amazon is expanding its Amazon Web Services to Switzerland. The services are set to be accessible within the Greater Zurich Area from 2022 onwards. Amazon intends to exclusively operate the data center in Switzerland.
Amazon Web Services has announced the establishment of the new AWS Region Zurich. According to a press release, this is to open from the second half of 2022 with three availability zones. Data generated within Switzerland will additionally not leave the country. AWS explains in the press release that its plan is to provide developers, start-ups and businesses, in addition to governmental, educational and not-for-profit organizations, with the capacity to run their applications and serve end-users from data centers located in Switzerland
The AWS Region Italy only opened at the beginning of this year. Works are underway to complete another in Spain, in addition to two more located in Indonesia and Japan. The AWS Region Zurich is to become the eighth AWS Region within Europe, AWS states. It will supplement those already opened in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan as well as the one announced for Spain. In global terms, there will ultimately now be 27 AWS Regions with 77 availability zones overall.
Amazon Web Services Case Study
Amazon Web Services, is the largest public cloud service provider, and thus is a good case study for how its on-ramps, network nodes and compute or storage nodes, are being architected. This can help rationalize why public cloud service providers are using hyperscale data center facilities.
Above is a depiction of across the United States and Western Europe. The dotted lines signify Amazons private network of dark fiber or wavelengths, which connect the different Regions together.
Amazon Web Services operates in a series of Regions. It currently has 24 geographic Regions and 77 Availability Zones worldwide, including:
- United States: Northern Virginia, Ohio, Northern California, Oregon
- Europe: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Ireland, Stockholm
- Asia:Tokyo, Japan Osaka, Japan Seoul, South Korea Singapore Hong Kong Sydney, Australia Mumbai, India Beijing, China
- South America: São Paulo, Brazil
Each Amazon Web Services Region is connected to Amazons private network . Amazons private network consists of dark fiber or wavelengths leased from the largest fiber providers like Zayo and Lumen Technologies.
In addition to its Regions Amazon Web Services has a larger number of Edge Locations. These locations are where end users access services located at Amazon Web Services such as:
- Content Delivery Network
- Distributed Denial of Service
- Firewall
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Aws And Its Economic Impact In Northern Virginia
Over the last decade Amazon has undertaken a massive expansion in Northern Virginia to provision more capacity to keep pace with the growth of the AWS cloud. AWS and its development partners are continuously acquiring land and building data centers to ensure that the company doesnt run out of server space. This translates into jobs and spending to construct and operate the facilities, as well as tax revenue for local communities.
Amazons $35 billion included spending on IT equipment, construction labor and materials, utilities, security, data center employee salaries and third-party services to build and operate data centers. In 2020, Amazon estimates its data center activities contributed $1.3 billion in GDP and supported over 13,500 jobs in Virginia.
Here are some key data points on the employment and tax impact of its data centers in Northern Virginia and the counties where AWS has focused its investment:
A chart of construction employment to support Amazon Web Services data center projects in Virginia.
Why is Amazon making these disclosures? The audience is clearly public officials and residents in the communities where AWS is locating its data centers. and have also released reports on the economic benefits of their data center projects.
AWS is familiar with this trend, as its data center expansion in Haymarket in Prince William County was the focus of a four-year public controversy as residents fought against utility towers to support the project.
Cloud Building At Scale Is Capital
Amazons $35 billion investment in Virginia is certainly its largest investment in a single state. AWS US-East Virginia region is the companys largest region, including six Availability Zones clusters of data centers within a region that allow customers to run instances of an application in several isolated locations to avoid a single point of failure. No other region in North America has more than four AZs.
That spending aligns with the massive capital needed to build out cloud computing platforms. Google, Microsoft and Facebook are also making big investments in their data center infrastructure, investing between $600 million and $4 billion for each data center campus they build.
Synergy Research Group estimates that hyperscale operators invested $149 billion in capital expenditures on an annualized basis, with spending growing at about a 30 percent clip from year to year.
Trends in hyperscale data center capital investment. .
Given the ongoing growth in service revenues for hyperscalers and the ever-increasing need for a larger global data center footprint, we are forecasting continued double-digit growth in hyperscale capex for several years to come, said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group.
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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.
Once in a whilenot quite often enough to be a crisis, but just often enough to be a tropepeople in the United States will freak out because a huge number of highly popular websites and services have suddenly gone down. For an interminable period of torture 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. 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 its where AWS first set up shop in 2006. 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 thats often to blame when large parts of the U.S. Internet dies.
Northern Virginia is a pretty convenient place to start a cloud-services business: for reasons well get into later, its a central region for Internet backbone. 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.
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Jonathan Maciasit Support Engineer Data Center Operations Lead Oregon
Before Jonathan Macias enrolled in the Data Center Technicians Training Program, he was studying for a general studies associates degree, and feelingby his own admission very indifferent about what he wanted to do with his life.
Macias college advisor, Peter Hernberg, who was setting up the program with a team from AWS at the time, tried to persuade him to apply.
Peter said to me, We have this very new program. Were kind of ironing out the kinks, and I was hoping you would join us. But I wasnt sure if I really wanted to do it, so I refused, said Macias.
When the program started again the following year, Hernberg again tried to persuade Macias to join. That year, it worked. I decided to pause my studies and take the classes, said Macias. It was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Although Macias had a very basic background in computers, as they got into the more nitty-gritty technical stuff, he found himself learning a lotand enjoying it. He was, however, concerned about his job prospects.
I kept thinking, there are a lot of people in my class. The odds of me being chosen for an interview, or even getting a job at Amazon seemed very low. Then, as we went further into the program, I developed connections with my classmates and heard from guest speakers at AWS. I started to think, you know, maybe I do have a chance.
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Magic Quadrant For Cloud Infrastructure As A Service Worldwide
Customers are increasingly choosing AWS to host their cloud-based infrastructure and realize increased performance, security, reliability, and scale wherever they go. For the tenth year in a row, AWS is evaluated as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, placed highest in both axes of measurement Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision among the top 7 vendors named in the report.
You can read the full Gartner report here.
Amazon To Invest $3 Billion To Open Data Centers In Spain In 2022
- Amazon said its cloud unit AWS will invest $3 billion over a period of 10 years to open new data centers in Spain.
- The investment includes capital expenditure, construction and operating expenses such as salaries for new hires.
- AWS has had a presence in Spain since 2012 and is building more infrastructure in the country.
U.S. tech giant plans to invest 2.5 billion euros in new data centers in the Spanish northern region of Aragon that will open in mid 2022, the company said on one of its websites on Monday.
The cloud computing service unit of Amazon, Amazon Web Services, will invest the amount over a period of ten years, the company said.
The investment includes capital expenditure, the construction of the centers, imports of equipment and operating expenses such as the salaries of the 1,300 employees the company will hire there.
Amazon Web Services has had a presence in Spain since 2012 and is building more infrastructure to be able to host data in Spain for its customers who require it.
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