‘The truth is, everything is so centralized’: AWS outage reveals world’s internet choke point, a single data center cluster in Virginia

But despite its ubiquity, most users don’t know what the cloud is or where it is.

Here’s what to know about the data centers in Northern Virginia where the outage originated, and what the glitch reveals about a rapidly evolving industry.

Internet infrastructure rental

Cloud computing is a technology that allows companies to remotely access massive computing equipment and services without having to purchase and maintain physical infrastructure.

In other words, businesses range from Snapchat McDonald’s essentially leased Amazon’s physical infrastructure located in places around the world to operate its websites. Instead of building expensive computing systems in-house, companies rely on them Amazon To store data, develop and test software, and deliver applications.

Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, making up more than 41% of the market, according to the market research group. Gartner. Google and Microsoft They are the next biggest competitors.

The largest and oldest center

Although the cloud seems like an abstract, formless entity, its physical location is important: proximity to cloud data centers determines how quickly users can access Internet platforms.

Amazon Web Services has only four cloud computing centers in the United States, according to its website. These services are strategically located in California, Ohio, Virginia and Oregon to provide fast services to users across the country.

A user’s distance from the center affects how quickly they can access platforms.

“If you wait one minute to use an app, you won’t use it again,” said Amr Al-Saeed Ahmed, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University in England.

The area in Northern Virginia where Monday’s problems arose is the largest and oldest cloud center in the country.

The Virginia cluster known as the US-East-1 region is responsible for “an order of magnitude” more data than its closest cluster in Ohio, or even its large hubs on the West Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kenttech. The idea of ​​a large cloud provider like Amazon is that organizations can split their workloads across multiple regions, so it doesn’t matter much if one region fails, but “the reality is that the whole thing is 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 the planet,” Madori said. “We have this incredible concentration of IT services that are hosted outside of one region by one cloud provider for the world, and that represents a fragility of modern society and modern economy.”

More than 100 warehouses

The servers are not located in just one building.

Amazon has “more than 100” sprawling computing warehouses in Virginia, most of them in the suburbs on the fringes of the Washington, D.C., area, said Lydia Leung, an analyst at Gartner.

Leung said one reason it is Amazon’s “most popular area” is that it is increasingly becoming a hub for… Dealing with artificial intelligence Workloads. The increasing use of chatbots, image generators, and other generative AI tools has increased demand for computing power and led to a boom in the construction of new data center campuses across the United States and the world.

Monday’s report from TD Quinn He said major cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of U.S. data center capacity in the fiscal third quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of power, more than last year’s total combined.