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Errors cause massive internet outage Amazon The cloud services collapse Monday morning demonstrated how many people rely on the corporate giant’s computational infrastructure every day — and exposed the vulnerabilities of the increasingly centralized system.
But despite its ubiquity, most users don’t know what the cloud is – or where.
Here’s what you need to know about the Northern Virginia data centers where the outage originated and what the outage says about the rapidly growing industry.
Internet infrastructure rental
cloud computing is a technology that allows companies to remotely access large-scale computing devices and services without purchasing and maintaining physical infrastructure.
In other words, businesses ranging from snapchat McDonald’s essentially rents Amazon’s physical infrastructure located around the world to operate its websites. Instead of building expensive computing systems in-house, companies rely on Amazon to store data, develop and test software, and deliver applications.
According to market research group Gartner, Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, accounting for more than 41% of the market. Google and Microsoft are the next biggest competitors.
largest and oldest hub
Although the cloud seems like an abstract, formless entity, its physical location matters: proximity to cloud data centers determines how quickly users can access Internet platforms.
Amazon Web Services According to their website, there are only four cloud computing hubs in the US. They are strategically located throughout California, ohioVirginia and Oregon will provide faster services to users across the country.
The user’s distance from the hub affects how quickly they can access the platform.
“If you’re waiting a minute to use an application, you’ll never use it again,” said Amro Al-Sayed Ahmed, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University in England.
The area of Northern Virginia where Monday’s problems occurred is the nation’s largest and oldest cloud hub.
In fact, the Virginia cluster known as the US-East-1 region accounts for “orders of magnitude” more traffic than its nearest cluster in Ohio or even its larger West Coast centers, said Doug Madory, director of Internet analytics at Kentuck. The idea of a large cloud provider like Amazon is that organizations can divide their workloads across multiple regions, so it doesn’t matter if one fails, but “the reality is that it’s all very centralized,” Madori said.
“For a lot of people, if you’re going to use AWS, you’re going to use US-East-1, no matter where you are on planet Earth,” Madory said. “We have this incredible concentration of IT services that are hosted by one cloud provider out to the world from one region, and that presents a weakness for modern society and the modern economy.”
more than 100 warehouses
Servers are not located in just one building.
Gartner analyst Lydia Leong said Amazon has “more than 100” giant computing warehouses in Virginia, mostly on the outskirts of the Washington metropolitan area.
Leong said one reason Amazon is “the single most popular area” is that, in addition to being one of the oldest, it is rapidly becoming a hub for handling artificial intelligence workloads. The increasing use of chatbots, image generators, and other generative AI tools has increased the demand for computing power and accelerated the construction of new data center complexes in the US and around the world.
A report Monday from TD Cowen said leading cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of U.S. data center capacity in the third fiscal quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of energy, more than last year’s total.