Why Amazon's data centers are in spy country (2016)

There is no mystery here. The "spy country" link is more of a coincidence; after all, the Internet was a DARPA project, and Northern Virginia is where a lot of defense and government stuff is.

When DARPA Internet was turned over to the public, one of the largest interconnect points was at 8100 Boone Blvd (Tysons Corner), known as MAE East [1]. Once upon a time I had access to it, as did countless other people running small ISPs around the area and renting rack space in that building. But the building (it's actually three buildings, and the MAE gigabit switch [2] was in the basement across the street) was not really suitable for any kind of a data center, though above.net did manage to convert the whole level of a parking garage into one, albeit with very low ceilings.

Pretty soon everyone figured out that by Dulles airport rent is way cheaper, you can build from scratch, there is plenty of electricity and water and connectivity is cheap, and AOL was out that way too.

That's pretty much the story. Amazon barely existed then. There used to be a nice bookstore nearby called "Computer Literacy Bookshop", which eventually went all online and later got acquired by Amazon or B&N, can't remember...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East [2] http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012...

People like to say it is s mini Silicon Valley here. A lot tech companies have some presence here Oracle, MS, Google, Verisign, AWS, etc. Obviously this is also government contractor land. Then there there are those buildings without any signs but with 3 layers of fences, and every other person seems to work for the "State Department" (cough cough CIA).

But I think another reason companies like it here is because of tax structure. I hear it is more advantageous for them than being in DC or Maryland.

Other fun thing, apparently if you dig around Tysons Corner you have a high chance of randomly hitting 3-letter agencies' fiber. And then black SUVs come and talk to you in a surprisingly short amount time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...

If you want to know where all the data centers are in N. Virginia just fly into Dulles and look out the window. The approach into Dulles is usually long and low from the west and the data centers are the low large buildings with big generators and lots of chillers outside.

There's a fuck ton of them.

I'm actually quite suspicious about everything Amazon is doing out there. I was recently contacted about a job at Amazon that they advertised would gain me a government security clearance. The main problem being that I'd have to move to Virginia.

I don't think it has much to do with "spy country". The area just happened to be one of the first to build a co-location/interconnect site where different providers could join their networks. Then, as the article states, "Networks build atop networks" and it grew from there.

Its not surprising that anyone running data centres doesn't advertise when I worked for BT our data centre at staples corner had no external branding.

This was for security as DC and Exchanges are CNI targets - ironically the PIRA did blow up the building next door.

One of the thing this piece misses in describing the weird banality of Northern Virginia is comparing it to someplace else. I'll compare it to San Francisco. For reference for people not used to the D.C. area, Northern Virginia (NoVA) is about the same size as the San Francisco Bay Area...without the Bay. The major city it's associated with is Washington D.C. instead of San Francisco (two cities of roughly the same size) and the regions have roughly comparable household incomes. However, the GDP of the Oakland-San Jose-San Francisco metro is about twice that of the D.C. metro.

Northern Virginia doesn't really have any incorporated large cities to speak of but it's just at the southern end of the Northeast Megalopolis mega-region [1] so it's quite urban in many areas. Notable "cities" might be Tysons Corner, Alexandria (a city without a county), Arlington (a county with a city), Reston, maybe a couple others. Large parts of the area are preserved as National Monuments, National Parks and Battlefields from the Civil War. However, most of it is very very suburb.

Despite the image of being , being near the seat of government it also has an amazingly diverse population. The boring suburbs are also punctuated with restaurants from almost every country you can guess, religious groups from JW to Jainism and even local theaters that will play Bollywood to Korean Horror.

And I don't mean like a few representative examples, I mean like a dozen competing large supermarkets that deal in goods for Asian customers from a dozen countries, a half dozen for Latin and Hispanic, African restaurants from around the continent, a reasonable Vietnamese-town like area, two (almost three if the third one can ever get established) Korea towns, a couple quasi Chinese areas, a dozen or so up-scale dining and shopping areas. One could easily eat a meal from a different country for every meal of the day for months and not exhaust the region.

The diversity is so intense and the population so large the area can support very niche kinds of services, for example, you can find several Indian owned coffee shops that focus on coffee and Indian desserts, or you can go eat Chinese Hotpot, then hop out for a few hours of conversation at a local hookah bar and finish your evening at a Korean spa, then wake up at 2 in the morning and go get all night Salvadorean food. The next day you stop at a Korean bakery for breakfast, work your hangover off on Ethiopian food for lunch before diving into your choice of Persian, Afghan, Lebanese, or Kazakh style kabobs for dinner. It gets kind of ridiculous and knowing how to eat with chopsticks, what to do with injera, roti and how to eat Pho, Sam Gyup Sal and that real Tacos aren't crunchy is basically expected among locals. Ndole, Silpancho or Pupusas for lunch and Thai, American Chinese, Szechuan, Beijing or Taiwanese for Dinner is not untypical. Locals feel weird in less diverse environments and don't understand why they can't eat from the world when they travel.

You get all the benefits of suburbia, but very few of the downsides (nightlife could be better). The weather is the worst form of all the seasons: hot, humid summers; cold wet winters; frequently overcast; with a few days of nice spring and a few days of nice autumn with colorful leaves. Because of the huge numbers of migrants, nobody knows how to drive in the winter, skiing sucks and Atlantic water sports are boring.

Two major airports, rail links, several ports nearby, a thriving tech industry (mostly serving the government) and a huge stable employer (the government) mean that the economy is remarkably stable in the face of massive economic up/down turns. It's hard to catch a wave up, but it's also hard to find yourself without a job, especially if you work in tech. You can drive for 30 miles in one direction on one road and see almost back-to-back-to-back tech companies. Traffic is easily #1 or #2 in the country with no predictable patterns or ways to estimate transit time, so out of towners expecting back-to-back meetings all over the area are very sad.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis

An incalculable, but very significant, portion of all human knowledge is locked away in secret, nondescript buildings.

I've always wonder what would happen if us-east-1 was somehow destroyed. How much would be lost?