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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see these modern cloud centers with racks and racks of GPU servers, or 64-core custom ARM CPU blade servers with terabytes of RAM... I can't help but wonder how many years it will be until I can just pick one rack up off Ebay for a few hundo and play with it, like I used to do with old 80s and 90s obsolete surplus. The way things are going... probably never.

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These things last 10+ years in the cloud so you'd need to be willing to buy something truly obsolete that's already been stripped for spare parts. Also, I imagine you'd have to be willing to cart off an entire rack, which won't be a standard rack but a weird shape, and then you'll need somewhere to plug it in, which won't be a plug as such but a point to which you'd need to wire 600VAC, or whatever that cloud operator was using. Finally, you're going to need some way to connect its weird network to your plain old network.

Oh, and all the management features of the rack won't work because I am sure they would wipe their proprietary software before resale. Basically you're buying raw materials in an inconvenient package.

You're more likely to be able to pick up an Outposts rack, which is at least designed to go into a more "normal" datacenter.

> The way things are going... probably never.

Why not? What way are things going then?

I'm wondering the same. Maybe they're implying that things are going to get so bad that Amazon will just never be able to afford to replace them and they'll stick around like an IRS mainframe?

It seems the hyperscalers are more in favour of shreding their hardware rather than putting it for sale on ebay. But I'm not sure if this holds true, I have seen old Google servers on /r/homelab.

They have data sanitization requirements that become difficult to manage at scale if they do anything else. Are you SURE there was no customer data stored in a recoverable-by-modern-physics manner on that machine you sold? Would you stake billions of dollars on it?

Pretty much everything is encrypted at rest in the big datacenters these days

It most definitely is not. And once you leave AWS or GCP proper the amount of control plane and other data that's encrypted at rest plummets. The industry is VERY not good at this at scale. And besides, encrypted customer data is still customer data. Metadata about encrypted data might divulge sensitive stuff, etc.

Have you seen actual google servers, or their whiteboxed dell search appliances they sold for a while for other people to run in their own datacenters?

These are some examples of the search appliances: https://www.ebay.com/itm/155187480321 https://www.ebay.com/itm/284745813810

I simply do not see corporations selling off obsolete equipment in the ways I used to. It seems it has become cheaper and less of a burden to take EOL hardware and shred and sell for scrap than to sell off in a way that could ever wind up in a normal person's hands. I've seen this first hand recently- this very, very well known company had a new plant, with a whole warehouse of industrial equipment just old enough to be considered obsolete- literal highbays full of what were once very advanced robotics and specialized machines, perfectly useable for hobbyist engineers or even small startups, but too much of a burden to try and sell off for this company as that would take too long- the space was needed yesterday. So a service came that literally sawed things off the floor with grinders and torches and used excavators to load up railcars with anything metal. Electronics and cables were simply cut and piled in separate bins. It all literally went for scrap value, and in ways that it could never be repurposed.

Sounds like an opportunity for a “scraping” company to make under market bids and resell equipment

Disposal contracts often have clauses prohibiting activities like that.

Unfortunately if you got a rack of Amazon's custom ARM servers you'd need access to their software to get it to boot. You need the device tree description of the hardware to get a Linux kernel booting and there's no standard for distributing or discovering those in ARM boards.

It's deeper than that since they probably have hardware root of trust watching over boot. I'd be shocked if you could get it to boot at all without Amazon's signing keys.

Cloud hardware lasts longer than you think. There's a widespread misconception that it gets cycled out constantly, but the truth is, new hardware almost always supplements, rather than replaces, the old stuff. When I was at AWS we occasionally had to code workarounds for very old SKUs.

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