Satya Nadella: The cloud is going to move underwater
Low latencies and easy deployment make underwater servers convenient and effective.
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Speaking at the company's Future Decoded conference in London, Nadella said that undersea deployments are "the way will think about data center regions and expansion." He cites proximity to humans as a particular advantage: about 50 percent of the world's population lives within 120 miles of a coast. Putting servers in the ocean means that they can be near population centers, which in turn ensures lower latencies. Low latencies are particularly important for real-time services, including Microsoft's forthcoming Xcloud game streaming service.
The other big advantage Nadella cited is the speed at which servers can be deployed this way. Without the need to build an actual data center, he said that from start to finish the Scottish pod took just 90 days to build and deploy. This shorter time to market means that the company can be reactive, adding extra server capacity near to where it's needed L2oJw1a_qEM.youtube