How the World Got Wired · The Cloud

The Warehouses

I want you to know what AWS’s warehouses are actually like. Because the cloud sounds like a soft thing, and the real thing is anything but.

A modern AWS data center is a building the size of several football fields, with no windows, often surrounded by a fence. Inside, in long aisles that look like the racks of an enormous library, are thousands or tens of thousands of servers — small computers stacked on top of each other in metal frames. Each server is doing some piece of work for some customer somewhere in the world. They hum, all the time. They generate enormous amounts of heat. Cooling them — running enormous air-conditioning systems all day and night — uses more electricity than any other part of the operation.

A single AWS data center uses about as much electricity as a small city. In the part of the United States where AWS has built the most data centers — a region called Northern Virginia, in the suburbs near Washington, D.C. — the local power grid has been strained for years by the sheer number of data centers feeding off it. Some new data centers cannot be built right now, because there is no more spare electricity to give them.

The data centers are also, increasingly, located in places chosen for specific reasons. Cold places help with cooling (Sweden, Ireland). Near rivers help with water for cooling (Northern Virginia, Oregon). Near nuclear power plants help with the electricity (Amazon and others are now buying nuclear plants specifically to power data centers).

Each big region of the world has a handful of these AWS regions: at least two in the United States, one in Ireland, one in Germany, one in Singapore, one in Tokyo, several in others. (China has its own. AWS does not really operate inside the Great Firewall — for the reasons you read about in the last chapter, Chinese cloud computing is dominated by Chinese companies like Alibaba and Tencent.)

A non-trivial fraction of the world’s information now sits in those warehouses. Your photos. Your school assignments. Your medical records, in many countries. Government documents. Bank transactions. The streaming videos you watch. The messages you send. All of it lives in buildings most people have never seen, run by a company whose name is on every cardboard box in the country.

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