Discussion

bilekas: > It seems like a lot of the blight of data centers is the energy to remove the heat.Not really the only issue actually, the electricity bill would be astronomical for a household and also have you heard the noise from them ?Issues with them being distributed range from Data protection to Insurance against damage, connectivity issues. Noble maybe, but it's widely unrealistic.

iamnothere: A half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine.Data protection is an issue, but maybe this is something that SGX and family can provide eventually.A scheme like this makes a lot of sense for distributed redundant backups.The real problem is bandwidth. Most home users still don’t have decent symmetrical bandwidth. If you could solve this, then home servers could provide a handful of edge services to others in the area. I’m not sure where this makes sense versus local colo though.

bilekas: > A half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine.I have home servers, designed for home and they are not too bad, and I can turn them off when sleeping for example.. It's very different with a 20U server running and spinning non stop. Not many people will have the soundproofing to simply not hear it at night.I don't know, I wouldn't see it working, but I'm just one.

BillTthree: Why don't we all have solar panels on our roof to generate electricity for ourselves?Why don't we all have small farms on our properties, turning lawns into vegetable producing land for each household?Why don't we have small datacenters on the property of each business, so the business users and IT folks can keep track of their own servers and data and applications?

GTP: You would have issues with providing the reliability levels (read: SLA) that we come to expect from data centers. But, if there are enough services that we don't care about if they go down for a few hours, this could be doable. It still relies on the assumption that we got enough services to justify the effort though. It is way more realistic if you set up your own homelab and provide services to your family, under the caveat that they may go offline every now and then.

bognition: It turns out, if you build it correctly, you can get BETTER reliability SLAs. There's a company https://www.storj.io/ thats been doing this for years.

kube-system: I doubt it, there are data centers with several decades of 100% uptime.

kube-system: Many reasons prevent this from being practical for any serious purposes.1. It depends on what part of the world you are in, but many homes have cooling needs for at least part of the year. The needs to remove excess heat would go up if you are adding more heat -- and it is less efficient to do this at the scale of an individual home than it is at DC scale.2. Power requirements: While many homelabs have UPS systems -- they lack often lack backup generators, redundant A+B power infrastructure, and don't have the required power density for higher powered servers.3. Connectivity requirements: most homes don't have access to the connectivity that data centers do.4. Security requirements: homes simply can't meet the security requirements of most data protection regulations5. Access requirements: homes aren't conducive to a technician responding to an outage at 3amAnd those are just the big ones.

comrade1234: Does your house have redundant power connections to the grid and a failover generator?That said, my plex server for my friends is on an ups and I'm on 1Gb fiber and I have better uptime than AWS.

zoklet-enjoyer: Lots of people have had this idea since the early days of Bitcoin mining. Some have even done it. I recommend looking up how people have set up mining rigs in their homes.

gaws: > I have better uptime than AWS.You're not serving tens of millions of people.

moribvndvs: You’d have to run a lot of Electron-based apps to go from tepid to hot water.

troyvit: How distributed would it have to be to make up for the lack of redundancy? DDoS attacks work for a reason, so how feasible would it be (if you had massive buy-in) to scale tiny data centers? I honestly don't think that feasible, because you can't get that massive buy-in, but I'm curious what others think.