Its not so grim up here
a New UK North region may be on the cards?
We got space and comms, and cooling will generally be easier, and staff generally cheaper
Just saying ... if Capacity is an issue ...
There are rumblings that Azure is having capacity issues once again, with customers in the UK South region reporting problems getting new VMs provisioned. One Register reader got in touch after attempting to add a new VM in the UK South region and receiving this message from Microsoft's Capacity Management Team: "Unfortunately …
I have to wonder whether this issue might actually be due to DC cooling problems rather than a shortage of HW to run up new VMs in those DCs.
If it is due to a lack of HW to run up new VMs then it implies unforeseen business growth. On the other hand, given the current weather, unforeseen cooling needs seems more likely.
Well there was this piece: AWS launches on-premises EC2 instances for reverse hybrid cloud
Which would seem to suggest that some are beginning to get it (its only taken 10 years...). To take one example, an SI, located in the SE, has a football pitch sized data centre, now sitting largely empty as clients have moved their loads off their outsourced systems into the cloud, it seems natural to refill that datacentre with cloud servers rather than MS et al building yet another DC...
Indeed, like all things cloud, you assume it'll work until it doesn't, then report to your manager why. From the perspective of the IT staff unable to work, there is no longer anything to worry about other than reporting what the cloud is telling you to upper management.
Personally I like the complete lack of responsibility I have now, very little for me to worry about fixing, just fire off an e-mail "Our suppliers are currently looking into the problem, we're very totally unbelievably sorry for the outage caused by the decisions of upper management, but our hands are tied."