On Monday, October 20, a massive internet outage caused by errors in Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed how many people rely on the corporate giant's computing infrastructure daily, as well as the dangers of an increasingly concentrated system.
Despite its widespread use, most users have no idea what or where the cloud is.
Here's what you should know about the Northern Virginia data centres where the outage occurred, as well as what the incident tells us about a quickly evolving business.
According to Gartner, Amazon is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure and platform services, accounting for more than 41 per cent of the market share. The next two major competitors are Google and Microsoft.
Although the cloud sounds like an abstract, formless entity, its physical location is important: The proximity of cloud data centres influences how quickly users may access internet platforms.
Amazon Web Services has only four cloud computing hubs in the United States, according to its website. These are strategically located in California, Ohio, Virginia, and Oregon to provide speedy service to customers across the country.
Businesses ranging from Snapchat to McDonald's essentially rent Amazon's physical infrastructure located in various locations around the world to run their own websites. Instead of creating costly computing systems in-house, businesses use Amazon to store data, develop and test software, and deploy apps.
Monday's tech outages originated in Northern Virginia, which is the country's largest and oldest cloud hub.
According to Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at Kentik, the Virginia cluster known as US-East-1 region generates "orders of magnitude" more data than its next cluster in Ohio or even its major West Coast hubs.
The theory behind a large cloud provider, such as Amazon, is that enterprises can distribute their workloads over different areas, making it less important if one fails, but "the reality is it's all very concentrated," Madory explained.
"For a lot of people, if you're going to use AWS, you're going to use US-East-1 regardless of where you are on Planet Earth," Madory told Associated Press. "We have this incredible concentration of IT services that are hosted out of one region by one cloud provider, for the world, and that presents a fragility for modern society and the modern economy."
The servers are distributed across multiple buildings.
According to Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, Amazon has "well over 100" large computing warehouses in Virginia, most of which are located in the suburbs outside of the Washington metropolitan region.
According to Leong, one of the reasons it is Amazon's "single-most popular region" is that, in addition to being one of the oldest, it is rapidly becoming a hub for managing artificial intelligence workloads.
The expanding use of chatbots, picture generators, and other generative AI tools has increased demand for processing capacity, resulting in a construction boom of new data centre complexes around the United States and the world.