There are a lot of downsides to self-hosting your git as well. Especially if you need to deal with high availability, scalability beyond a single server, and/or being open to the public Internet.
I'm not saying you should never self-host your git server, but it's not for everyone.
No, these things are actually much easier to solve when you don't have to care for millions of users across every timezone and can just focus on <10,000 users that can easily be handled with a modest VPS setup.
It's truly pathetic how developers today cede everything to cloud services. A $20 VPS (whatever gets you 4 gigs of ram) is likely enough to host all the business needs of 90% of SMBs across the US.
Even easier today with things like Docker, Forgejo, and other great self hosting solutions.
Why would a company care about opening up their codebase to the internet? These are problems you don't have to care about when you only want a small subset of solutions. Especially when the tradeoffs are drastically simpler.
Land is expensive, water is scarce, people don’t want sound pollution anywhere near them.
Building a datacenter in the neighborhood is already unpopular enough that companies do tricks to prevent public from knowing what is being built and by whom in advance.
Sending a small box with a panel to space may be a solution if a: the inside of the box is expensive and the cost to launch is cheap.
You amortize the box over 2-5 years and burn it in the atmosphere afterwards.
If the math is mathing, multiply by a million and voila, you have a datacenter in space where each rack is flying separately.
With a regular compute it may not be profitable but with GPUs connected to each other by optical links? I think it may be possible.
In the Sahara there is plenty of space and plenty of solar. Any heat you can radiate away in space, you can radiate away on Earth. Or, more simply, dig into the ground and pump heat into the cool earth.
In theory it "should" be much easier to build on earth, but in some ways it's just different challenges. On earth you're forced to deal with those pesky government things and in the Sahara not a lot of them are exactly reliable or good-faith actors. Then there's night time. So out of the gate, you're dealing with needing massive power storage for the night time.
So you invest $5b into a solar farm and data center outside of Tunis and 5 years after you finish construction a popular uprising topples the government and now you're dealing with new management? Nah, nobody is going to do that. And who's going to work there? How are you going to get data out of there? You're going to end up using satellite comms anyway. It's not 1953 any more and (thankfully) nobody is in a position to "Operation Ajax" your popular uprising when that happens too. I mean, maybe, but yeah, I would not do it.
Even in relatively stable places like the US or the EU, let's say you bought some random parcel of land in the New Mexico or West Texas desert region. Or even in Southern Spain or something. Even if you get the land cheap, with relatively easy fiber access (doubtful, but whatever), you're still beholden to the communities there. You think they have spare water to cool your facility? How are the schools for the kids of the engineers working there? You think that people are going to be head-over heels in love with Amarillo or Extremadura? The land is cheap because people don't want to live in these places, so picky people are going to steer clear. And at the end of the day, you're still going to have to get everything permitted, approved, stamped 80 times, and the project will grind on for months.
No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there. You can park the satellites in a sun synchronous halo that lives about on the terminator, and just pull in power constantly and radiate directly away from the sun in the other direction. It's going to be expensive, it's going to be technically challenging but we will do it. Also, think about the California high-speed rail stuff. If you try to build on earth you're going to be permitted and social-media'd to death anywhere on earth you decide to build one of these. For better or worse people hate Elon. I mean, I understand it, he's kind of insufferable and his dalliance with politics was a bit of a disaster (seriously, USAID cuts are killing people), but he's certainly no moron and I do not think he's entirely un-selfaware. He knows that people aren't going to let him build these wherever he wants. You're going to have to ask for permission thousands of times, there's going to be social media campaigns to stop him, literally any screw up (his fault or not) is going to be loudly shouted to everyone. If he decides he wants to expand his facility, that's more permits, more restrictions, more permissions.
So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone. Initially that was red states or at least relatively "non-hostile" states like where Tennessee, but even there people will squawk about it. I don't mean to say "squawk" to dismiss those folks, well, maybe I do, but I just think it's a bit silly in the context of us burning gazillions of gallons to bomb the Iranians. Nobody is going to do a damn thing about the climate or anything right now, and stopping data centers from getting built feels like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, but I digress.
Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical. The technicians and engineers can live in California, or work remotely from anywhere really, and you won't have to deal with increasingly well funded and clever NIMBYs. The real challenge is going to be finding optimal launch sites for this stuff. Hilariously, my neck of the woods up here in Alaska is uniquely suited to launch into inclinations that would allow for constant sunlight. It's what, 98 degrees inclination for an SSO? So you can launch launch north out of Poker Flat and south out of Cape Chiniak. Though we don't have the infrastructure up here to support that out of Poker Flat yet. And nobody will squawk too loudly about it up here. I think those lunatics trying to slingshot satellites into space are trying to launch out of Adak too, so, hypothetically, that's an option as well other than the logistics of getting vehicles up here.
Anyway, this has turned into a bit of a book report, but these companies are not optimizing for cost savings right now, they're optimizing to avoid people telling them no.
>> No, space is an end run around dealing with bureaucracy and politics. It's space. There's basically nobody to tell you "no" up there.
>> So they'll go to the place where they do not need to ask anyone.
>> Anyway, space has none of those problems. Indeed, the problems are almost all technical.
This is pretty naive. What happens when one of the other sovereign nation destroys your space assets or holds them hostage. There is also no defense in space.
You think Grand Forks ND or Tempe Arizona is going to say, “we’re going to shoot down your datacenters?”
Of course not. The only people to stop you is like 6 nation states that have the capability to tell you no, you know? Maybe less? And most of them all need your launch capabilities?
Cmon. Who is going to tell them no? The US government? And jeopardize NRO satellite launch abilities or whatever? No, the Feds won’t stand in the way.
Destroying a satelite is much easier than launching one, even with existing systems. Worse, given rate of improvements, I think we're going to get ground-to-orbit anti-satelite lasers before 10% of this constellation gets launched.
And at least one of the nations with the existing military capacity to make a "no" stick is currently considering criminal charges against Musk personally, while another has a long history of assassination including of their own oligarchs.
It is upsetting that you get downvoted. I think people in the US are thinking that a war is impossible or something, and looking for a stereotypical response.
Instead, for an eastern and central European countries, a war is the real threat. The chance to lose a war with Russia backed by China is very real.
And the reason it is real is the loss of protection from the US. It is no longer guaranteed that the US will participate once Russia invades, and that makes the invasion itself almost inevitable.
Participation of the US is important only because it has a massive stockpile of WMD. It is obvious for everyone that US is not prepared for a modern war on the ground against a real power.
Prosperity and economic growth doesn't really matter when you are threatened with losing the massive war with causalities calculated in millions.
You first want to secure and guarantee peace for the future, and then you think about economy, competition and so forth.
And massively increasing weapons production is the way to avoid the big war.
Ot actually doesn't change their recommendation. There will be less, market share among people really worried about the American government. Others would be happy to pay for a better cloud run locally mostly under local laws.
It is funny that in terms of values they are not a leader but a follower of Russia. The origin and protector of all their conservative values - including fake Christianity, view on power and gender, race, minorities government structure and so on and so forth.
90% of that are destroyed far away from targets and the other 10% do cause some damage, but it is usually far from being devastating as the drone is far from being very precise.
A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem. If Russia has 10 of them, I think it would significantly alter the current equation of power as it may allow for air superiority.
> A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem.
The difference here is an F-35 + precision weaponry + intelligence to locate high value targets.
It's always going to be cheaper / easier to use shorter-range munitions, which means the launch platform has to be higher / closer.
But without strategic intelligence (what high value targets exist, and what are they supporting?) and targeting intelligence (where are they right now, and where will they be?) neither of the other two capabilities are valuable.
Logistics and command inevitably trend towards centralization, because it's inefficient and expensive to decentralize everything (and at some point the tyranny of compounding logistics makes it impossible).
Where there is centralization, there's a high value target, and that's a job for the F-35 and exquisite standoff weapons.
Should forces be a mix of high-low? Of course! That's something the US realized in the 80s and is why we have the F-16! (still flying, being built, and exported!)
So where is the air superiority over Iran? This only proves Palmer Luckey right. Future of warfare has changed drastically and all countries are taking notes from this War.
Forgejo is great.
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