Why Ashburn:

According to [1]:

"Ashburn is the Internet’s boom town. It sits atop the world’s densest intersection of fiber networks, making it an ideal location to store and distribute data. .... It was home to MAE-East, the Internet’s first major interconnection point. A startup called Equinix built its first data center in Ashburn in 1998, providing a “carrier-neutral” facility where companies’ networks could tap into Internet backbones."

[2] describes trend for Y16, Y17. Worth a read. I was told by my SVP about his visit of Boston and he said Boston also hosts some of the major financial and entertainment businesses (e.g Netflix? I thought they shut down their own DC already) for Boston is also atop of major Internet backbone. I didn't verify this claim yet.

[1]: http://datacenterfrontier.com/the-ashburn-data-center-buildi...

[2]: http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-North-...

I live in ashburn. The rate at which they are building datacenter here is unreal. I have a 5 minute commute to the office and I drive past two new data centers and 4 more under construction. Pretty much anywhere that there is open space, they're building another one, or planning to.

How does it affect the environment, despite their efforts to keep heat and CO2 emission as low as possible? How's the wild life there?

Really looking forward to AU GCP!

Hopefully it is as reliable as us-east-1. /s

Is Google’s us-east-1 unreliable? Would you mind to share any details?

Employee of an AWS customer here hosted primarily on us-east-1.

We've had a box get water damage after a big storm.

Also, I once met someone who works at the datacenter. He said it's crazy hot inside. They apparently only cool the building the bare minimum required to keep the servers functional. Very Amazon.

Why would you spend millions of dollars over cooling a DC? Computers don't have feelings.

I recall reading a google study that disks last longer and are more stable running hotter than usual.

"After looking at data on over 34,000 drives, I found that overall there is no correlation between temperature and failure rate."

From BackBlaze: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-i...

Reading the same study, I recall that higher temperate cause slightly more premature deaths (< 6 months), it makes no difference afterwards.

us-east-1 is AWS.

Added this to http://www.gcping.com/ and it's currently my nearest/fastest region, from NYC.

This is funny. Google used to have clusters in Virginia. Not in Ashburn, but close, in a colo facility. You wanted to use them if you cared about latency to e.g. Philly, NYC and Boston. Then they were turned down because of all the capacity that was brought up on the East Coast in its own facilities.

Imagine that, a PaaS offering served out of the location where 70% of the world's entire internet traffic goes through, in a location drowning in technical talent and with one of the largest possible consolidated customer bases on the planet.

Waiting for their services in Australia!

The Federal Government region is what I think they mean.

Perfect region for the NSA to make use of GCP!

Did anything ever come of that movement to write an open source software license like "Anyone can use this, except the NSA"? It was a briefly-popular idea in 2013 or so.

Good luck enforcing that or finding out if the NSA is using your software. It's just a silly idea.

Probably, though it came about after finding out the NSA uses Sinatra, so it's not entirely impossible.

OCB has an explicit "no military use" license. It caused huge headaches for e.g. openssl; they had to get a special exemption.

http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license.htm

See also the JSON license.

It is a contradiction of terms. An open source license cannot exclude any groups, else it is not open source.

Everyone knows the NSA is an AWS shop.

This comment is getting downvoted, but there might be some tongue-in-cheek truth: the CIA, after all, did a $600 million deal with AWS to build an on-premise cloud.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...

>What you need to know about the AWS Canada (Central) Region.

>Is my data secure?

>AWS is a battleship carrier armed with a thousand of the world's best security engineers, on a robust proven security driven platform, used by the NSA and the CIA. Their business depends on protecting your data.

http://www.trinimbus.com/faq-amazon-web-services-canada-regi...

USG and military have access to different select portfolios of Amazon and Microsoft Azure service depending on the data said system stores (classified, not, PII, PHI and for whom) and how it must be secured by USG or DoD regulations.

Amazon was the first and only answer. Ironically Azure Gov and DoD are catching up.

There is indeed truth to it. The cloud in the deal you mentioned is open to all IC agencies and not just the CIA.

I thought it was funny

But North Virginia is where datacenters have the most instability! AWS has shown that...