Failover Architectures: The Infrastructural Excess of the Data Centre Industry

At its most basic, cloud computing refers to an infrastructural shift from desktop computing (where files and applications were stored on the local hard drives of our computers) to a form of online computing (where these are stored in data centres accessed remotely ‘as a service’ through the Internet). This service model for delivering computation, where multiple clients shared data centre space, was known as ‘colocation’ (‘colo’ for short) and formed the foundation for the industrialization of computing that would become the cloud. Consuming Computing

The cloud, then, is an extremely expensive and energy-intensive enterprise, not only because of the large capital outlays involved in constructing data centres but also because of the costs required to constantly power these places and their multiple failover sites.

Source: failedarchitecture.com