Yet another Hacker News

44 points andsoitis 2 hours ago 36 comments

jharohit 1 hour ago | parent

not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly. Just increases attack vector and not very value adding to people. most customers care about latency and as long as you can point to a region where you are its enough

0xcafefood 1 hour ago | parent

Is it actually possible to hide the locations of datacenters? At least large ones?

cowlevel 31 minutes ago | parent

Yes. They are not trivial to distinguish from other large industrial buildings. If you know a building is one, you still don't know whose.

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

> not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly.

Transparency is good.

cowlevel 30 minutes ago | parent

Think they're referring to the recent drone/datacenter velocity exchanges in Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East.

3eb7988a1663 1 hour ago | parent

Surely anyone with an interest could find this through various means.

Also easily found potential military targets: power generation, water treatment, hospitals, schools, government buildings, etc.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

Kinda hard to hide them when you choose to build them in people’s backyards and ask them for a local tax break. The Meta ones near me are very visible.

IncreasePosts 55 minutes ago | parent

There's also probably 100k people at Google who can see where all their data centers are, and it just takes one to tell someone else

walrus01 23 minutes ago | parent

Finding a datacenter from aerial or space photos isn't hard if you know how to identify a heat exchanger or huge generator. Both of which are very distinctive. Then limit that search set to certain sizes of big rectangular buildings. And ones with relatively low counts of passenger cars parked during mid day times.

gradus_ad 1 hour ago | parent

Surprised at how few there are...

BadBadJellyBean 1 hour ago | parent

And none of the on the continents of Africa or Australia.

jeffbee 1 hour ago | parent

Nobody lives there. Ten times more people live in Indonesia.

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

>> Africa

> Nobody lives there

Africa has just under 20% of the world's population.

jeffbee 46 minutes ago | parent

I was pretty obviously responding to the Australia part.

charlieyu1 30 minutes ago | parent

Is population actually an issue? The cost may well be cheaper

shric 20 minutes ago | parent

They have a cloud presence in Sydney for example. They just presumably don’t own the DC because it’s too small to be worth building their own

btmiller 15 minutes ago | parent

Not a Google employee. Last I recall, the only place in Africa that stood to benefit from local infrastructure was South Africa, yet because of how geographically isolated it was from the next nearest hop, latency and packet loss were just intolerable. The latter should be solvable, though the former was dependent on closer neighbors. Same goes for Australia, more or less. I’m curious why there isn’t more demand in Nigeria or Kenya though!

johannes1234321 1 hour ago | parent

I assume that's only their own data centers, not where they rent space in other data centers.

kevin_nisbet 1 hour ago | parent

I was confused at first but it seems like the site lists for google products only, doesn't seem to list some of the regions google cloud is available in (such as nothing in shown in Canada). But scrolling down it has a link to Google cloud regions.

mlh496 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting. Not a single data center in California.

cavemandaveman 48 minutes ago | parent

Cost prohibitive?

jeffbee 45 minutes ago | parent

Not enough people to serve.

asdff 11 minutes ago | parent

It is all about power costs. Tennessee for example seems like a weird place to put a datacenter, until you read about the TVA.

hollow-moe 1 hour ago | parent

I've been looking for datacenter tech job. With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier. Guess there's a lot of them being built but none near there, or are companies being secretive about that, staffing internally? Am I looking in the wrong places ? (Usual job hunting sites, linkedin)

cavemandaveman 49 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft is listing positions on their public job board (I know because I'm nosy and they're building a big data center complex a few miles from me). They look like good jobs for the area. A couple pay over $100K and only require a high school diploma for what looks to be essentially security guard roles.

bayarearefugee 43 minutes ago | parent

> With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier.

Data centers don't need very many employees once they are built, many have less than 20 employees.

This is a big part of the reason why they are such a bad long term deal for localities and why giving them tax breaks, etc is just a scam. They add a lot more negative externalities than they help with the local economy.

cavemandaveman 25 minutes ago | parent

Are you sure? Microsoft hired about 500 full time employees for its first data center in Wisconsin.

https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-hired-375-people-for-moun...

trimethylpurine 15 minutes ago | parent

And most of them will be on unemployment or working on another location pretty soon.

walrus01 24 minutes ago | parent

A warehouse of equivalent size in square feet often doesn't have many more employees, if it's just a bunch of truck docks and people driving forklifts.

asdff 13 minutes ago | parent

That's also a problem but a modern one. Only a generation or two ago an industrial property of that size might employ four figures worth of hands and employ most of the neighborhood or town in question.

trimethylpurine 16 minutes ago | parent

You're fishing in a small pond with few fish. It doesn't take many people to run a DC.

ImJasonH 1 hour ago | parent

When I was at Google I built https://gcping.com/ for fun to measure latency to each cloud region. I'm honestly surprised it's still up!

hmokiguess 32 minutes ago | parent

Why surprised?

asdff 16 minutes ago | parent

Useful working tools tend to get sunset by google before long. Google earth pro is getting killed this January, get your downloads in.

lijok 31 minutes ago | parent

Astonished they disclosed this. Even more astonished how few there are.

How many of these would have to get destroyed for them to go out of business?

sxp 19 minutes ago | parent

Wow. This is a pretty bald-faced lie by Google. They're defining "datacenter" very narrowly in a way that lets them hide their actual footprint. E.g, they're ignoring the various caches they have in the SF Bay Area, NYC, and other metropolitan locations. Back when they were running Stadia, their claim was that they had edge nodes single-digit milliseconds from major population centers. They also run their servers in datacenters which are technically not owned by "Google". That's why Google Cloud has an us-west2 near LA not on this map but their GCP site makes different claims from this website: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations