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Comment by hoofhearted | Hacker News Reader

I helped build “The Cloud” without really knowing it lol..

I joined a 5 year electrical apprenticeship after highschool. I spent many days between 2006 and 2012 building out crazy electrical systems in these giant warehouse looking buildings in Northern Virginia, for DuPont Fabros and Digital Reality.

I had no idea exactly what the purpose of these server farms were for, but they just told us “if we build it they will come” lol.

I had always wondered who “they” was, and who was renting so much server space.

Eventually we heard that Amazon was leasing some of these buildings, but it was crazy to think that an online bookstore needed such crazy infrastructure.

Flash forward to today and these buildings are called “us-east-1” lol..

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Funny, I was building fiber optic switches around 2010-ish. I'm not talking one of those cute little 48 or 64 port things. I'm talking 250+ inputs and 250+ outputs, where each input is able to route to any output port independently, all with under < 4dbm loss through the optical core, and a switching time of something like 1-2ms.

IIRC, these things were like 18U beasts. I think 4 of them fit on a standard rack? One of the reasons we employed interns was so we'd have people to plug the damn things into the calibration and diagnostic rigs if necessary. Think about it: each LC connector has to be cleaned, then plugged into the correct port, for over 500 ports. If cleaning and plugging in the connector takes, say, 2 seconds in total, that's 30 minutes just to get it hooked up to get checked out.

Besides getting to play with high powered lasers and work on exotic hardware pretty much nobody has ever seen (which also sold for more than my annual salary at the time), I frequently got to work in one of our clean rooms (my sinuses loved me at that job lol), work with hardware and mechanical engineers, and usually had to figure things out on my own, because nobody else was building these things at that scale and there were no fine manuals to read.

Fun times.

I was under the impression us-east-1 launched in 2002 or 2003. AWS was certainly a thing in 2004, at least.

Yes, your timeline is correct with the boom in Ashburn. It started out with Acc1, then Acc2 and then Acc3.. These were just some tiny buildings compared to the DC’s that would come in the next 20 years. ACC4 came online somewhere around your timeline as well.

ACC4 was the most state of the art data center in the world when it opened, and it was like 10 times the scale as the previous 3.. Construction halted on ACC5 when the 2008 recession hit. They said the funds dried up to continue construction, and laid thousands of workers off one morning.

Things picked back up a number of years later, and I believe they are past ACC12 now lol..

Here is ACC4, and 5 is right next to it..

https://maps.apple.com/?ll=39.018565,-77.461943&q=Dropped%20...

The newer generation data centers with 2 floors right down the street eclipse the ACC’s of the past and make them look child’s play.

Goddamn that's pretty crazy

https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-centers/americas/northern...

Am I understanding this correctly, basically a Colo was acquired by Amazon?

It’s pedantic but colo existed for decades before AWS.

It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud” (quicker access to hardware & billing by the second, not month)

Nope. As I understand it, Amazon doesn’t actually own data centers; similar to how they don’t own warehouses.

My understanding later on in my career shift to computer engineering was that Amazon is renting out the whole colo, and just owns their equipment.

Amazon isn’t maintaining the datacenter infrastructure such as cooling and power, but instead it’s covered in their bill.

Isn’t this though wrongly taking credit.

This is like saying “I sell cardboard boxes to Amazon, who uses my cardboard boxes to ship packages” … and then claim you built the logistics and online behemoth of Amazon.com

I’m not trying to be a hater. But this story sounds more like you were a supplier to something Amazon built, not something you built.

> Isn’t this though wrongly taking credit.

No, because it says "without really knowing it" right in the first sentence.

But they did “know it”.

When you’re building data centers, you are fully aware you are building “The Cloud” (even before that term was coined), because that’s literally the business you’re in … regardless of who you’re customer (AWS) is or not.

Is there a reason you're so intent on being a killjoy? Is there really an important point being made here? Don't worry, they do not falsely believe that they invented and built AWS.

This story is basically akin to someone who works at a restaurant saying that one day a celebrity came in and ordered a hamburger, and a photo was taken with the hamburger that ended up becoming famous, and them saying that they made that hamburger. It's just an interesting "I was a small part of something that became big" story. But thank god we have you here to make sure that that person doesn't go around telling people they built AWS.

I mean, that’s kinda what AWS is doing right now with its customers’ successes with gen ai, no?

So then who owns the warehouses that have Amazon logos on them, exclusively used by Amazon with Amazon employees working inside them?

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/06/13/prologis-amazon-warehous...

Prologis controls roughly 1 billion square feet of warehouses and distribution centers used by companies including Amazon, Home Depot and FedEx.

Probably there are others as well that rent warehouses to Anazon.

Having a sign with the name of a business on a building does not mean that the business owns the building itself.

Many companies rent offices for example, and put their logo on the building where they are renting offices.

A building I worked in had multiple tenants. My (now former) employer leased five of the six floors, but the big sign on the building advertised a company that had half of the first floor at most. Obviously they were willing to pay more money for advertising rights.

Does this explain the proliferation of "Salesforce Towers" around the world? I have not been convinced they actually need that much office space.

> Amazon doesn’t actually own data centers; similar to how they don’t own warehouses.

Are you certain they don't own at least a fraction of the facilities they use? Amazon has very good credit (AA or AA-), which in a lot of cases probably means they have access to cheaper money than their landlord does. When you factor in the landlord's profit margin, it just doesn't make sense for Amazon to rent rather than to issue bonds and buy.

I imagine that they do rent as well, since it lets them respond more quickly to demand / business needs, but it would just be really weird for them not to own any of their own critical infrastructure.

Edit: Looks like it's a mix of leased and owned, on both counts

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/amazon-web-servic...

https://therealdeal.com/national/2023/02/07/amazon-slams-bra...

But to answer your reply further, yes colocating already existed in the northern Virginia area because of Arpanet, the internet exchange, and AOL all being in the area pre 2000’s.

DuPont had been building in Datacenter Alley for a number of years already, but the buildings were way smaller; and the systems less complex. ACC1, 2 and 3 are all still there in operation today and have been retrofitted a number of times since 2000. Today, those tiny DC’s are apart of the bigger network in the area; and are just connected together via private fiber loops.

https://maps.apple.com/?ll=39.022237,-77.457433&q=Dropped%20...

> It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud”

That's one way of looking at it, but no one would have used that software if OP had done a sloppy job with the electrical system.

I'm sure there was plenty of boilerplate code in that software (and some very innovative code) and plenty of sophisticated work done to create the physical datacenter.

> OP had done a sloppy job with the electrical system.

Everyone always wonders why us-east-1 shits the bed more than others. Now we know why.

/s obviously.

This is really cool, do you still do electrician work now?

No, I was actually really fascinated by the server and IT infrastructure in these types of operations and worked to make a career switch to programming.

I’m a full stack engineer now professionally, and work on open source code on the side.

Really sorry to hear how things turned out for you career-wise. Just know that we all feel you and we are here whenever you need to talk about it.

Haha yeah, this is my tech safe space lol..

The career path hasn’t been so bad. Applied my understanding of electrons to computer science, and have launched a number of apps and services since.

Currently working on a side project that’s a WordPress alternative built with Next.js and Tailwind :)

https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli

Cool username

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