I posted this in the Calgary Openings, Closings, and Developments thread but getting an AWS Datacentre Region is a big deal for Calgary and Southern Alberta so I think it should get its own thread as it's quickly de-railing the other one.
As Shazam mentioned in the other thread, a datacenter region is a big deal as it's actually multiple datacenters to serve all of Western Canada and there's a lot of infrastructure required as well such as solar farms, etc. This is not on the level of an Amazon HQ but it's much bigger than fulfillment centers.
I've always been surprised that Microsoft has not created a Western Canada datacenter region and has conglomerated it into just Toronto and Montreal - maybe because of Ontario nuclear and Quebec hydro running them.
It was also clarified in the other thread that this is investment over time and the 900 jobs in the article are across Canada as much of the work can be done remotely. They expect to invest $21 billion in its two Canadian infrastructure regions by 2037, which will support more than 5,000 new jobs.
Many Canadian companies have data residency concerns - they don't want your private financial or health data to go into the US for example so datacenter regions within the country are important.
You can soon add a dot to where we are.
Last edited by Hack&Lube; 11-08-2021 at 07:10 PM.
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Hopefully it ends up being more than a handful of server farms with not a ton of jobs post construction. The cynic in me also expects them to set up shop outside the city limits to avoid taxes. I like the direction things are heading but hope it isn't just a handful of buildings with a skeleton crew running everything.
An AWS datacenter is awesome news. It's effectively 3 self sustaining data centers that have their own power grid for the biggest cloud computing platform in the world. Cloud based virtual machines is really the future and is only growing exponentially in scope.
While 900 jobs doesn't mean all will be in Calgary, most will, and this is a great sign that Calgary is seen as a very viable tech hub. We have the space and infrastructure.
There will be more datacenters. Three is barely acceptable.
This will bring technology companies here. Latency still matters - a lot - and the speed of light ain't changing anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of HQs set up here as other Canadian regions are in poor power reliability areas and/or earthquake zones (I'd never use services based on the west coast - ever).
For Toronto especially, a lot of the Azure and AWS datacenters are actually contracted out to 3rd party providers which is why they have a good presence there. Calgary has basically no spare datacenter capacity, mostly because Telus has done nothing significant in the datacenter space for about 30 years.
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How many cities in North America have these large scale data centres? Is this just another piece of infrastructure every city of our size gets or is it punching above our weight?
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Both have a lot of gov't contracts and those datacenters are supposedly exclusive to them (the "GovCloud/US Gov" regions).
I wouldn't say it's common nor standard to "get one", no matter your size. If anything being a large city is a disadvantage. LA/NYC are terrible places to have datacenters.
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This is great news even though I have no clue what a datacenter is.
Most things you do on the internet run through datacentres now. It used to be that every company ran their own server hardware, connected it to the internet, and you'd access their website that way. Now, most companies contract that hosting to a datacentre, setup servers virtually where the server OS or platform runs on someone else's hardware, segregated from everyone else, sharing resources like RAM and CPU, though you can have exclusive access too.
Even CalgaryPuck uses a Content Delivery Network(CDN) which distributes site resources geographically, so you access some CP content from the datacentre that is closest to you, for faster access. Netflix co-locates their content at ISP's like Shaw, so your video is accessed quickly, and doesn't need to travel over the internet from distant places. It also saves Shaw loads on backbone bandwidth.
Datacentres are definitely very important to the internet going forward, and are an efficient method of delivering content, storing and processing data, and doing everything companies used to do with onsite servers. Having AWS so close means really good things for us in general, because the internet for AWS hosted sites will be faster and more responsive. Good for users, good for business.
Last edited by Fuzz; 11-09-2021 at 10:09 AM.
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That's awesome for Calgary. Not a ton of jobs with datacenter operations, but the side benefits from tech companies wanting to be near a data center are huge. We have several datacenters here in Phoenix, including Apple's which houses their NOC/SOC. For an IT guy, these places will blow your mind.
The Apple facility is crazy. The sheer scale of this places is hard to believe. Very unassuming from the street unless you know what you are looking for (security and power generation). Imagine four Costcos side-by-side, all filled with racks of servers 15' tall, aisle-by-aisle, each stack with a dedicated cooling plant. You peer down the row and they fade off into the darkness. It's surreal. The power consumption is insane. I was lucky enough to get into the backplane space and see the fiber optic connectivity. Everything, and I mean everything (including the management frame), was fiber optic connected. Walked out of there and would laugh any time someone would suggest their data and systems were better off in an enterprise datacenter.
Anyone who wants to get a job in this space needs to get some training on kubernetes and get their head wrapped around containerization. Good on you Calgary, and good luck in spinning this into some economic diversification!
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I really hope this puts pressure on Microsoft to get a data centre built out here. This will allow companies with latency sensitive applications to seriously look at migrating them to the cloud. Current US West 2 latency was about 35ms last time we checked, which can be okay depending on the application.
anyone have a sense of where this will physically be located here in town?
good news for calgary in general, of course i wonder how much tax breaks they have given and i guess while i laughed at calgary's play for HQ2 - maybe it helped tilt the field a bit on this
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anyone have a sense of where this will physically be located here in town?
good news for calgary in general, of course i wonder how much tax breaks they have given and i guess while i laughed at calgary's play for HQ2 - maybe it helped tilt the field a bit on this
Hopefully outside of the city. From a DR perspective, doesn’t make sense to have it in the city. Q9 in bankers hall for example…terrible location. The one in the SW though, much better