Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to find the entirety of AWS’ northern Virginia footprint, but I could probably find bits and pieces of it. My itinerary was a slightly haphazard one, based on looking for anything tied to Vadata, Inc., Amazon’s subsidiary company for all things data-center-oriented.
.. While suburbs were largely marketed to the public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured “natural” landscapes, suburban sprawl’s dispersal of populations also meant increased likelihood of survival in the case of nuclear attack. Highways both facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget that the legislation that funded much of the U.S. highway system was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956).
.. Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region, as the Loudon county economic-development board cheerfully notes in its marketing materials.
.. In 2012, a now-lost blog post by network-intelligence startup DeepField estimated that on average, one-third of all daily Internet usage accesses a site running on AWS. Over the last three years, that percentage has most likely only increased.