Comment by chatmasta

Comment by chatmasta 6 months ago

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It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1.

Cloudflare has also historically used “datacenter” to refer to their rack deployments.

All that said, for the purpose of the blog post, “building your own datacenter” is misleading.

boulos 6 months ago

You're correct, there are multiple flavors of Google Cloud Locations. The "Google concrete" ones are listed at google.com/datacenters and London isn't on that list, today.

cloud.google.com/about/locations lists all the locations that GCE offers service, which is a super set of the large facilities that someone would call a "Google Datacenter". I liked to mostly refer to the distinction as Google concrete (we built the building) or not. Ultimately, even in locations that are shared colo spaces, or rented, it's still Google putting custom racks there, integrating into the network and services, etc. So from a customer perspective, you should pick the right location for you. If that happens to be in a facility where Google poured the concrete, great! If not, it's not the end of the world.

P.S., I swear the certification PDFs used to include this information (e.g., https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/iso-27018?hl=en) but now these are all behind "Contact Sales" and some new Certification Manager page in the console.

Edit: Yes! https://cloud.google.com/docs/geography-and-regions still says:

> These data centers might be owned by Google and listed on the Google Cloud locations page, or they might be leased from third-party data center providers. For the full list of data center locations for Google Cloud, see our ISO/IEC 27001 certificate. Regardless of whether the data center is owned or leased, Google Cloud selects data centers and designs its infrastructure to provide a uniform level of performance, security, and reliability.

So someone can probably use web.archive.org to get the ISO-27001 certificate PDF from whenever the last time it was still up.

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matt-p 6 months ago

The hyperscalers are absolutely not colo-ing their general purpose compute at Equinix! A cage for routers and direct connect, maybe some limited Edge CDN/compute at most.

Even where they do lease wholesale space, you'd be hard pushed to find examples of more than one in a single building. If you count them as Microsoft, Google, AWS then I'm not sure I can think of a single example off the top of my head. Only really possible if you start including players like IBM or Oracle in that list.

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  • chatmasta 6 months ago

    Maybe leasing wholesale space shouldn’t be considered colocation, but GCP absolutely does this and the Slough datacenter was a real example.

    I can’t dig up the source atm but IIRC some Equinix website was bragging about it (and it wasn’t just about direct connect to GCP).

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    • matt-p 6 months ago

      Google doesn't put GCP compute inside Equinx Slough. I could perhaps believe if they have a cage of routers and perhaps even CDN boxes/Edge, but no general cloud compute.

      Google and AWS will put routers inside Equinx Slough sure, but that's literally written on the tin, and the only way a carrier hotel could work.

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      • chatmasta 6 months ago

        Then why do they obfuscate the location of their servers? If they were all in Google datacenters, why not let me see where my VM is?

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  • fragmede 6 months ago

    The best part about adamantly making such a claim is that anybody who knows better also knows better than to break NDA and pull a Warthunder to prove that the CSPs do use colo facilities, so you're not going to get anyone who knows better to disagree with you and say AWS S3 or GCP compute is colo-ed at a specific colo provider.

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    • matt-p 6 months ago

      They consume wholesale space, but not retail Colo for general compute, that's all I'm saying.

      Equinx is retail, with only a couple of exceptions, although I know they're trying to grow the wholesale side.

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  • deelowe 6 months ago

    Hyperscalers use colos all the time for edge presence.

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Over2Chars 6 months ago

Indeed, I've seen "data center" maps, and was surprised they were just a tenant in some other guys data center.

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  • chatmasta 6 months ago

    Which makes you a subletter, and the one with the highest fee of the whole chain…

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    • motorest 6 months ago

      > Which makes you a subletter, and the one with the highest fee of the whole chain…

      I don't know what point you tried to make. Any business in the whole world survives because they sell things for more money than what it takes to keep their business running. Is it surprising that they charge their customers more than their infrastructure costs?

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motorest 6 months ago

> It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.”

I think you're conflating things.

Those hypothetical hyperscalers can advertise their availability zones and deployment regions, but they do not claim they built the data centers. They provide a service, but they do not make broad claims on how they built infrastructure.

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