Machine Learning Tools are Coming to the Data Center

Back at the dawn of the internet, data centers could be small and simple. A large ecommerce service could do with a couple of 19-inch racks with all the necessary servers, storage, and networking. Today's hyper-scale data centers cover acres, with tens of thousands of hardware boxes sitting in thousands of racks. Along with the design changes, these mega-server farms have been built in new, remote locations, trading proximity to large population centers for cheap power. As they automate data center operations, public clouds like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure hire fewer and fewer highly skilled data center engineers, who are usually outnumbered by security staff and relatively low-skilled workers who do manual labor, such as handling hardware deliveries.