The Cloud and Data Centers

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Dwain: I've been wanting to do an episode on the cloud, because i think it is like this really important istructure that we maybe sometimes underestimate in its importance. When i started my career in the 19 nineties, one of the things i had to do was, as we said, rackenstack thee servers. And today, when we talk about cloud, we're still talking about data centers like micosoft and amazon and gubl. They've got data centers and are just renting out access to the computing and the data base capacity. Behind the scenes, there are people doing to day what i was doing earlier in his career, different equipment, but

Paris Marx is joined by Dwayne Monroe to discuss what it’s like to work in a data center, how the cloud came to hold a dominant position, and the consequences of its control by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Dwayne Monroe is a cloud technologist and aspiring Marxist theorist of technology, with twenty years of experience architecting large-scale computational systems. Follow Dwayne on Twitter at @cloudquistador.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Dwayne wrote about cloud computing for Logic Magazine. He’s also written about a public cloud and the metaverse on his blog.
Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in the eastern United States experienced a major outage in December 2021.
Residents in various parts of the world have been questioning the logic of building data centers, including in the United States and New Zealand.
In July, the network of Canadian telecom giant Rogers went down, leaving millions without service.

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