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Comment by amitutk | Hacker News Reader

The biggest tech hub in India is in Bangalore, but both AWS and GCP chose Mumbai. Because of proximity to international data cables?

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Yes: 12 cables land here SEACOM SEA-ME-WE-4 SEA-ME-WE 3 EIG I-ME-WE FLAG Europe Asia (FEA) FLAG Alcatel-Lucent Optical Network (FALCON) Gulf Bridge International BBG (Bay of Bengal Gateway) SEA-ME-WE-5 MENA AAE-1 (Asia Africa Europe)

https://www.cablemap.info/

The datacenters should be where the users are, not where the developers are.

By locating them at major internet exchange points they are doing exactly that, being closer to more users.

The users are in every building all over the country and the world - which makes the datacenters best positioned at the junctions and interchanges of global wiring.

Also power, yes Tamilnadu does lead the country with power generation but Maharashtra comes close second with better power distribution backed by top private sectors in the industry.

Source?

Enron -- Dabhol Power Company

>> Tamilnadu does lead the country with power generation but Maharashtra comes close second with better power distribution

As of November 2015, Maharashtra had 38 Gigawatts of generation to Tamil Nadu's 23 [1]. Maharashtra and Gujarat jointly produce a quarter of India's 100 GW; Tamil Nadu 8%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_India_by_installed_p...

Mumbai and Chennai are coastal cities with cable landings, but Mumbai is the finance and media capital - it has the stock exchange and Bollywood, both of whom I imagine will be big customers. And a bigger population as well.

Who exactly are big customers from Bollywood?

Not exactly Bollywood, but VFX outsourcing is big in India. From low-cost animation (think animation for kids' TV) to top TV drama like Game of Thrones to Hollywood blockbusters like Interstellar and Doctor Strange -- they all use outsourcing and most of these companies are in Bombay.

Datacenter staffing in the cloud is fairly easy; only about 6 or so are needed on-prem for HVAC and hands-on. The rest are remote. Many cloud datacenters are able to be located in extremely obscure locations because of this.

GCP and AWS do not use 6 people per region.

With AWS a region has more than one availability zone.

aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region ap-south-1 for example shows two datacenters in mumbai.

Across physical site security, to power to network to just hard drive and system decommissioning, more than 6 staff.

I wonder if this is partly why AWS has done so well. I've used colo and hosted providers who do seem to have basically no one actually on site.

Maybe double that number, or triple it. The point stands that you don’t need a large pool of local talent to operate a data center.

The Google data center in Hamina, Finland, statedly employs about 300. It's a mix of technical, security, catering and cleaning/facilities. Source (in Finnish): http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/google-ei-aio-laajentaa-da...

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