Microsoft shows mobile Azure data center with satellite connectivity via Starlink – IT Pro – News

If you have an uber-hot satellite connection, what’s the point of a local ‘mobile’ data center?

Unless it really involves huge amounts of raw data, isn’t it just as easy to send the data over your connection to a beautiful Microsoft data center somewhere in the Watergraafsmeer?

In my simple thought: Either you have poor connectivity, so you want a ‘serious’ datacenter locally, or you have good connectivity and therefore your datacenter has the cheapest electricity where-ever for Microsoft.

By the way, it’s nice that you can drop a container somewhere in a remote area and have connectivity, but where do you get your power from? If the answer is: generator. Okay, where do you get your fuel from?

Bottom line: I would invest in the infrastructure for a good connection, above the infrastructure for local ‘compute’, which seems a simpler and cheaper solution to me. The situations in which that does not apply seem quite niche to me.
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so you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
Suppose you use these things for data analysis in some very remote project, I name anything, mining, warfare, geographic research, etc.
how quickly do you have petabytes of data. and how fast is starlink really?

you can say that you think that the supply of fuel is an issue, but that is nonsense you can simply drop it from airplanes or deliver it with colones. usually you need it anyway, because where work or fighting has to be done, fuel is needed anyway.

no, these mini-clouds are mainly there to do the preparatory work.
if a job is so small that it can be offered very easily via satellite, then that will certainly happen because bringing in or flying in these types of containers is simply ridiculously expensive. but as soon as that is not possible, you can set up a small cluster that already filters out the 80% of useless data to send only the useful calculations to a central location where a full analysis can take place. at other times the latency (or better: the time of uploading, processing and downloading the results again) will be so great that you prefer to use local processing, which external sat connection is good for just retrieving external information.

in short, reason enough to invest in this.

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