If I tell you that the cloud is on the ground will you believe me? 😏. The Earth's cloud is between 2km to 18km away from the ground (depending on location), however, that's not the cloud I'm referring to. I'm referring to the cloud that we know of in software engineering. Today we'll be looking at data centres and as I hinted once (in my past articles), the cloud really is on the ground. data centres are places that have massive telecommunication equipment, servers, processors, storage facilities where the internet resides.
DATA CENTRES ARE REALLY HUGE
To understand the sheer size of these data centres, a bit of statistics is required. Google is rumoured to hold over 15 million terabytes of data, The internet is also rumoured to hold over 1 trillion terabytes of information. These are huge numbers. In terms of landmass, data centres are some of the largest man-made structures you can find anywhere on the planet, you typically find data centres that are the size of 10 football fields, with some stretching as wide as the size of 110 football fields combined.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
In tech, redundancy is a good thing, it's typically used to refer to a backup, a lot of data centres are backups for the main data centre. The situation of data centres in a place involves a lot of strategic thought. Data centres are usually put in places that have a low probability of natural disaster and a high population of netizens. The closer you are to a data centre the faster you're able to access the internet (through that data centre).
A lot of the things we've discussed before; servers, domains, websites, code and all are domiciled in these data centres. It's kind of like a massive library of hard drives and processors, though it has a bespoke configuration to optimize speed. Running data centres isn't easy, they consume more electricity than the average city, they also require a lot of water and coolant because we as netizens stress out those systems and they generate a lot of heat, computers don't work too well with heat.
FINALLY...
Owning a data centre is quite expensive and hardly ever profitable which is why a lot of organizations use cloud solutions that are like paying rent to use a specific amount of memory belonging to another organization's data centre. This cloud computing service is rather convenient as organizations save on the cost of building a data centre, providing uninterrupted power, security, cooling, maintenance and all the other bells and whistles. You typically pay for the amount of storage you use and that's it. Data centres are situated around the world by organizations that need to scale (eg. Google) because it's faster to access data from a data centre that is close to you than one that is far away.