What to know about the warehouses in Virginia that power a lot of the internet

A massive internet outage stemming from errors in Amazon cloud services on Monday morning demonstrated just how numerous people rely on the corporate behemoth s computational infrastructure everyday and laid bare the vulnerabilities of an increasingly concentrated system But despite it s omnipresence most of users don t know what or where the cloud is Here is what to know about the records centers in Northern Virginia where the outage originated and what the malfunction reveals about a rapidly evolving industry Renting internet infrustructure Cloud computing is a tool that allows companies to remotely access massive computing equipment and services without having to purchase and maintain physical infrastructure In other words businesses ranging from Snapchat to McDonald s essentially rent Amazon s physical infrastructure located in places all around the world to operate their own websites Instead of building expensive computing systems in-house companies rely on Amazon to store figures develop and test application and deliver applications Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services constituting over of the domain according to domain research group Gartner Google and Microsoft are the next biggest competitors Biggest and oldest hub Although the cloud sounds like an abstract formless entity it s physical location matters Proximity to cloud evidence centers determines how hurriedly users can access internet platforms Amazon Web Services has just four cloud computing hubs in the U S according to their website Those are strategically spread out in California Ohio Virginia and Oregon to deliver fast services to users across the country A user s distance from the hub affects how hastily they can access platforms If you re waiting a minute to use an application you re not going to use it again explained Amro Al-Said Ahmad a lecturer in computer science at Keele University in England The region in Northern Virginia where Monday s problems originated is the biggest and oldest cloud hub in the country In fact the Virginia cluster known as US-East- region is responsible for orders of magnitude more content than its nearest cluster in Ohio or even its big West Coast hubs reported Doug Madory director of internet analysis at Kentik The idea of a big cloud provider like Amazon is that organizations can split their workloads across multiple regions so it doesn t matter as much if one fails but the reality is it s all very concentrated Madory disclosed For a lot of people if you re going to use AWS you re going to use US-East- regardless of where you are on Planet Earth Madory mentioned We have this incredible concentration of IT services that are hosted out of one region by one cloud provider for the world and that presents a fragility for modern society and the modern economic activity More than warehouses The servers aren t located in just one building Amazon has well over of the sprawling computing warehouses in Virginia mostly in the exurbs at the edge of the Washington metropolitan area stated Gartner analyst Lydia Leong Leong noted one reason why it s Amazon s single-most popular region is that in addition to being one of the oldest it is increasingly becoming a hub for handling artificial intelligence workloads The growing usage of chatbots image generators and other generative AI tools has spiked demand for computing power and led to a construction boom of new information center complexes around the U S and world A summary Monday from TD Cowen commented that the leading cloud computing providers leased a staggering amount of U S statistics center limit in the third fiscal quarter of this year amounting to more than gigawatts of vitality more than all of last year combined Source