Where the cloud meets the ground

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: application, such as a Web-based service. Developers can quickly add extra machines when needed and shut them down if there is no demand. And the service is cheap: a virtual machine, for instance, starts at 10 cents per hour.

If Amazon has become a cloud-computing pioneer, it is because it sees itself as a technology company. As it branched out into more and more retail categories, it had to develop a sophisticated computing platform which it is now offering as a service for a fee. “Of course this has nothing to do with selling books,” says Adam Selipsky, in charge of product management at AWS, “but it has a lot to do with the same technology we are using to sell books.”

Yet Amazon is not the only big online company to offer the use of industrial-scale data centres. Google is said to be operating a global network of about three dozen data centres loaded with more than 2 million servers. Microsoft is investing billions and adding up to 35,000 servers a month. Other internet giants, such as Yahoo!, are also busy building huge server farms.

In some places this has led to a veritable data-centre construction boom. Half a dozen are being built in Quincy, a hamlet in the middle of America’s Washington state, close to the Columbia River. The attraction is that its dams produce plenty of low-cost power, which apart from IT gear is the main input for these computing farms. On average, cooling takes as much power as computing. Microsoft’s new data centre near Chicago, for instance, has three substations with a total capacity of 198 mw, as much as a small aluminium smelter.

But cheap electricity is only one, albeit important, criterion for choosing the site of a data centre. Microsoft currently feeds 35 sets of data into an electronic map of the world, including internet connectivity, the availability of IT workers, even the air quality, to see where conditions are favourable and which places should be avoided. Apparently Siberia comes out well.