I never knew

In 2007 I wrote a quick post about infrastructure opportunities.

I’ve also wondered previously about opportunities with cheap electricity, seems The Google and other huge server farms are spending more on electricity than on hardware, hello Hydro Québec joint venture?

Found this in September 2011:

The facility will run on geothermal and hydroelectric power – in Iceland, all electricity is from renewable energy sources. The project was commissioned by the UK start-up Verne Global, itself a data hosting company, which plans to use Iceland’s cheap power to undercut rival European offerings.
—World’s first zero-carbon data centre to be built in Iceland

And then this just last week:

The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US.
“The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers,” said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a ‘Node Pole’, luring in other international computing giants.
“If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it’s around 2C [35.6F].”
—Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle

See, now that would have made for an interesting Plan nord.

[Update on Nov. 7th] Thought so, seems they are on it (FR) but Hydro didn’t find the idea interesting enough 3 years ago. Merci Josée pour le tip.

I’ve mentioned before that some have issues with storing data on Amazon servers in the US. Well now Amazon are offering a european version of S3 which could cover that problem although I’m not quite sure, since Amazon itself is still an american company so maybe the data is still covered under the patriot act.

Last week a client (book editor) decided to go with a canadian hosting company because of certain copyright and public domain problems their lawyers were fearing if their content was hosted in the US. This morning I read this post about the Amazon S3 SLA and the author comments:

Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Acts (FIPPA) don’t allow me to store sensitive information (e.g., students’ work) in jurisdictions that permit secret warrants, like those mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act. It wouldn’t even help if Amazon ran a cluster farm in Canada, since the PATRIOT Act applies to subsidiaries of American firms operating in other countries as well.

Different but related issues. I’m sure those same issues apply to a lot of countries. Opportunity for canadian companies to step in with similar services? I can’t think of someone already well positioned to “just add” the service but I’m sure there’s expertise somewhere.

I’ve also wondered previously about opportunities with cheap electricity, seems The Google and other huge server farms are spending more on electricity than on hardware, hello Hydro Québec joint venture?

I’m kind of surprised Amazon doesn’t get more coverage for the fantastic web services they are producing. I guess a lot of the “missing” coverage is because it’s not stuff that’s easy to talk about or flashy but I also think they are making some of the more interesting moves out there and building an impressive package, it’s a gutsy idea on Bezos’ part to go in that direction.

It’s been around for a while but I’ve had a couple of separate discussions in the last few weeks with developers using The Elastic Compute Cloud and they are all very impressed with the ease of use and the flexibility of the service. Once your application backend can work within that system, you can switch server copies on and off, paying only for the time each virtual server is running, it makes getting Dugg or any other type of traffic surge a lot easier and cheaper to deal with.

The latest service to launch is Amazon Flexible Payments Services and offers a finely tunable platform to let any web app offer very advanced payment functionality. Fees are super competitive and they take into account the differences between credit card payments and bank account debits instead of keeping the difference. I’m looking forward to reading about how developers are using this.

With S3 (storage), EC2 and now FPS, it’s possible to build a completely virtual web application without any real physical servers, maintenance contracts or financial backend contracts, you can create a server “up in the cloud”, replicate it if needed, store client files and manage financial transactions all “up there”. I’m sure there are still factors making real physical server farms valuable but for some the cloud setup will work and for others it will make for a great testing/startup platform they can move from and use as needed.

Developers who can master these services and setup applications with such a cloud-based server package should get some real world work out there to show off and start offering their experience, there’s bound to be a lot of takers now and in the near future. I think proficiency with these tools is the next big job/contract offer hot item.