this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
486 points (96.7% liked)

Technology

59428 readers
3150 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

On purchasing servers; I don’t know about Google specifically, but most media partners I’ve worked with doesn’t have global acquisition as an option for hardwares — not because they don’t have the purchase power/volume, but rather the vendors have region specific distributors with their own sales teams and pricing. Even if you have the personal contacts of VPs high up the chain, someone from IBM China cannot even sell to companies in Canada, and vice versa, for example.

On people side of things… With YouTube specifically, you’re also not only dealing with their own DC but getting their hardware into local ISPs centres. Logistics around that is not something cheap remote labor can arrange, need actual boots on the ground to facilitate.

Ad sales is also something that’s kind of localized. YouTube has American teams selling American creator inventories for example. Not something that’s outsourced out.

So yea… Although from the outset it’s all just “YouTube.com”, there’s actually a lot of localized touch points that creates different costs to provide service in different regions.

[–] Badeendje@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

When I did it before, our company bought the hardware in bulk. We prep it, provision it and have it good to go. Then ship it off to wherever. PM has the local DC staff (if they provide that service, else a local IT company install the box and bring it online. The moment it is online everything is managed remotely. The local install costs is usually a few 100, once, just like the shipping.

We even shipped full racks (assembly required) with a complete connection diagram. All it needed was power and 2 internet cables everything else was done already.

If companies like google expand, this will surely be similar. But then at even larger scale. I cannot imagine them going around trying to find equipment everytime. You just have a contract with dell/HP/IBM/NetApp/Oracle and ask your account manager to ship you x number of type A server.