Hyperscale Cloud Platforms Dominated the Data Center Conversation in 2018

Like it or not, cloud giants and the hyperscale data centers they build to support their platforms dominate the data center industry conversation today.

You can see this very clearly in the amount of attention articles about these companies get on our site. Except for one piece, most of the ten most read stories of 2018 are in one way or another stories about hyperscale platforms.

The stories are about the sheer scale at which these companies are building infrastructure, about their reliability failures, about data center innovation they’re driving, about what they’re doing to compete with each other, and about their enormous efforts to convince enterprises running their own data centers (that’s still most of the world’s companies) to use their services instead.

The one outlier, the article that’s not about hyperscale cloud, is our December story about the US government’s utter failure to keep data centers used to manage the country’s ballistic missile defense systems in line with the most basic security standards.

There are several reasons our readers are hungry for information about the cloud platforms. Even though most corporate computing still happens inside on-premises data centers, hyperscalers are investing an unprecedented amount of money in infrastructure, while upending both corporate IT and the corporate technology market.

They’ve driven most of the technological innovation in recent years, making themselves impossible to ignore for companies that use IT infrastructure (which today is all of them), and forcing IT and data center infrastructure vendors to rethink their businesses from the ground up: an amount of soul searching few of these vendors have ever done. They’ve forced an equal amount of soul searching on the end-user side, where corporate IT departments that aren’t rethinking their roles will soon have their roles rethought for them.

Here they are, the 10 most popular stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge in 2018:

Rendering of the future Facebook data center in Huntsville, Alabama

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