This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is, and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240 operational total worldwide with another 130ish under construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran, they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very different environment.
I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario.
Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.
>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter
That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.
But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens.
The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet.
If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.
The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.
>We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated.
and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
How they were hit? Multiple drones overwhelming relatively small number of air defense systems. Systems like Patriot are great against several very capable targets like ballistic missiles. Such (expensive centralized) systems do much worse against multiple widespread targets like an armada of low flying low speed drones (add to that low speed cut-off filter to avoid hitting general aviation and the likes).
Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done)
We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war.
>I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard
Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states.
> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war
Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
> Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes
I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
War crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted within the USA. On this we agree.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the risk of not being able to leave the country, because I'd be willing to wager a bit more than international prosecutions for war crimes are significantly more likely, and would be occuring in a world that is growing noticeably more "America needs to be taught a lesson" in spirit.
War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies.
They're the way winners can punish their enemies.
If Germany and Japan had won WWII, US/British/Russian military and political leaders absolutely would've been on trial.
At the same time, agreements between peer countries to follow basic rules have generally held. Note that neither side in the current conflict is using dirty bombs, or dropping nerve gas or bioweapons on civilians, etc.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies
That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.
Isn't that an improvement? It seems better to have people who are honest about what they're doing, even when committing war crimes. At least then people can have an honest conversation about whether the policy is working.
One of the most frustrating things about wars is people adopt policies that don't advance their objectives and then lie about what they're doing, what happened and why. This sets up an environment where militarys do things that aren't even in their own interests, let alone anyone else's, and the public discourse is busy arguing about some wild imaginary scenario that isn't related. Better to have people focused on the real world and accurately understanding both (1) what the policy was and (2) what the outcome of the policy was.
That would require a future president to choose to use the authorization.
President Davis The First isn't going to lift a finger to stop the ICC prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and, I suspect, neither would quite a few other potential future presidents.
Most of the world that did convert to Islam, did it out of pragmatism. That goes for Catholicism as well. Though a special part of my heart goes out to the pragmatic Quakers of the early US, who largely seem to have done it just to have a chance to thumb their nose at the government.
Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter" next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".
Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
It's not quite as bad as in the UAE where only about 10% of the nation has citizenship but it's basically the same picture. Most people there are practically indentured servants
Trump really only babbles nothing burgers now. The whole "we must open the Strait of Hormuz", but it was closed following the invasion of Iran at the behest of Netanyahu proxy-controlling Trump - so how is that then logical that you refer to a prior state that already existed, as a new war-meta-goal? This is like an autogenerate of fake news and lies. This can not be the person really "leading" the USA, so who is really making those decisions? Trump even forgets what he said the day before and even contradicts himself in the very same sentence; then he chains buzzwords that make no sense, such as "we can not have healthcare because we must wage war instead". This is like George Orwell 1984, but stupid. George Orwell's book made sense; Trump is just dementia 2.0 1984 reversed. Nobody would read that Trump-novel, just as nobody serious would watch Melania. It's the ultimate Soap TV show for the US audience, but it is just not watchable. No risk management or analysis; Hegseth recently mass-fired those who said his plan is stupid. Well, even after firing people, the plan is just stupid.
>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.
The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
I don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do want to own them.
The people you rent yours from are making a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an idea
I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.
I don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile defence network, you are vulnerable.
In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is, and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240 operational total worldwide with another 130ish under construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran, they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very different environment.
I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers. Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What would be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
----
0: https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/
Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario.
Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter
That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.
But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens.
The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.
> worth their salt
That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.
Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff
To the parent poster's point.
Higher tier data centers can run for extended periods of time on backup generators, and some indefinitely if roads allow for diesel delivery.
You forgot the diesel generators within the DCs
Both seem like easy targets. Hitting the datacenters themselves could results in more permanent damage.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
(Perpetrators also not caught)
Transformers are also manufacturing constrained.
Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026
In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet.
If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.
Some systems are anycast and available in many datacenters for bandwidth cost reasons. Netflix used to deploy content caches in ISP edges.
But any single central point of failure might break them. Things like, is this account paid? Dunno!
I recently wrote a little on this https://generalresearch.com/detail-oriented/how-to-seed-a-cl...
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
Ironically,the classical target, Washington DC, is less than 25 miles down a very simple highway to Northern Virginia's massive datacenter alley. Our national defense is ultimately predicated on heavy ordnance not being able to show up undetected in this part of the world. Hence the path preferred by attackers of burrowing into Azure signing keys or ransomware attacks on the grid. Much less hardware to transport.
The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich rebuilding.
There are ways to shield data centers if one is serious about it...
e.g.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/oracle-opens-first...
Don't forget underseas cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
>We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly concentrated.
and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
How they were hit? Multiple drones overwhelming relatively small number of air defense systems. Systems like Patriot are great against several very capable targets like ballistic missiles. Such (expensive centralized) systems do much worse against multiple widespread targets like an armada of low flying low speed drones (add to that low speed cut-off filter to avoid hitting general aviation and the likes).
Point defense systems like Skyshield (or even that very old and cheap - $2M - Gepard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard ) work wonderfully against all those drones coming in.
Heck, even just soldiers with MANPADs would have easily shot down those drones (you just have to distribute those soldiers to all those strategic objects which hasn't been done)
We have classic situation here - everybody have been watching Ukraine war for 4 years, yet nobody has prepared for such style of war.
>I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
No even low flying slow drone - pretty typical situation of top Russian cruise missile shot down by Gepard
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/zdbvim/a_ukr...
Also AMZN has its own drones dept - in "hot" zones in "hot" times they can put several people with drones (in the high speed configuration) to be used for interception. This is basically how Ukranians have been doing, and that is an experience they are now exporting to the Gulf states.
https://www.hisutton.com/Ukrainian-Interceptor-Drones.html
> the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war
Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily winning the conflict.
Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
> Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never being able to leave their own country again for fear of prosecution for war crimes
I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026. That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
War crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted within the USA. On this we agree.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the risk of not being able to leave the country, because I'd be willing to wager a bit more than international prosecutions for war crimes are significantly more likely, and would be occuring in a world that is growing noticeably more "America needs to be taught a lesson" in spirit.
War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies. It’s hilarious people think this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as designed.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies.
They're the way winners can punish their enemies.
If Germany and Japan had won WWII, US/British/Russian military and political leaders absolutely would've been on trial.
At the same time, agreements between peer countries to follow basic rules have generally held. Note that neither side in the current conflict is using dirty bombs, or dropping nerve gas or bioweapons on civilians, etc.
> War crimes have never been anything more than a way the west can punish its enemies
That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we did isn't one.
Isn't that an improvement? It seems better to have people who are honest about what they're doing, even when committing war crimes. At least then people can have an honest conversation about whether the policy is working.
One of the most frustrating things about wars is people adopt policies that don't advance their objectives and then lie about what they're doing, what happened and why. This sets up an environment where militarys do things that aren't even in their own interests, let alone anyone else's, and the public discourse is busy arguing about some wild imaginary scenario that isn't related. Better to have people focused on the real world and accurately understanding both (1) what the policy was and (2) what the outcome of the policy was.
The Hague Invasion Act takes care of that.
That would require a future president to choose to use the authorization.
President Davis The First isn't going to lift a finger to stop the ICC prosecuting former Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and, I suspect, neither would quite a few other potential future presidents.
xAI's data centers in space (should they happen) will push the frontier of war firmly overhead too.
Hey now, we had space stations with cannons in what, the 70s?
If they hit AI data centers, 50% of software developers will convert to Islam. :)
Most of the world that did convert to Islam, did it out of pragmatism. That goes for Catholicism as well. Though a special part of my heart goes out to the pragmatic Quakers of the early US, who largely seem to have done it just to have a chance to thumb their nose at the government.
Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter" next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".
My partner works in that space.
Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.
Yep. Look at my last comment. Its exactly how to mitigate risk related to the nation you're in, in a data sense.
The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.
I didn't know they had strong workers rights/union culture down there to strike.
It's not quite as bad as in the UAE where only about 10% of the nation has citizenship but it's basically the same picture. Most people there are practically indentured servants
I hate when "the cloud" which I imagined to be some entity in ether space, turns out to be just a building with computers that can be bombed
Trump really only babbles nothing burgers now. The whole "we must open the Strait of Hormuz", but it was closed following the invasion of Iran at the behest of Netanyahu proxy-controlling Trump - so how is that then logical that you refer to a prior state that already existed, as a new war-meta-goal? This is like an autogenerate of fake news and lies. This can not be the person really "leading" the USA, so who is really making those decisions? Trump even forgets what he said the day before and even contradicts himself in the very same sentence; then he chains buzzwords that make no sense, such as "we can not have healthcare because we must wage war instead". This is like George Orwell 1984, but stupid. George Orwell's book made sense; Trump is just dementia 2.0 1984 reversed. Nobody would read that Trump-novel, just as nobody serious would watch Melania. It's the ultimate Soap TV show for the US audience, but it is just not watchable. No risk management or analysis; Hegseth recently mass-fired those who said his plan is stupid. Well, even after firing people, the plan is just stupid.
if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.
The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
I think it's a joke: you REALLY don't want to own your own servers.
I don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do want to own them. The people you rent yours from are making a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an idea
I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.
This includes things I have expertise in.
It sometimes makes financial sense to own your own servers
You should have the opposite takeaway - if you don't have redundancy in the cloud you don't actually have uptime.
I don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile defence network, you are vulnerable.
In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)
boolean "you are vulnerable" means nothing, because it's always True
spreading out decreases risk, concentration increases it
Your servers also may get hit with a bomb/missle.
Why would I want to own a cut-off datacenter in Dubai?