This is a great post! One logical nit though is that just because Netflix (and YouTube) have ~1000 edge locations doesn't actually imply that the world needs that many "medium to large data centers" (with large at presumably 30MW).
The number of world-scale massive bandwidth applications is pretty low. There are so many humans, they're only watching so much video, etc. and that's why Netflix and YouTube before them are at your ISP. Online gaming would be another such example, but would again be served by the minimal number for latency not bandwidth (this depends on your opinion of the relative popularity of gaming versus media consumption).
The regulatory / data locality angle is more likely to be the main driver for needing more data centers beyond the latency requirements. Otherwise, most customers just don't have the bandwidth requirements to necessitate a large facility.
This is a great post! One logical nit though is that just because Netflix (and YouTube) have ~1000 edge locations doesn't actually imply that the world needs that many "medium to large data centers" (with large at presumably 30MW).
The number of world-scale massive bandwidth applications is pretty low. There are so many humans, they're only watching so much video, etc. and that's why Netflix and YouTube before them are at your ISP. Online gaming would be another such example, but would again be served by the minimal number for latency not bandwidth (this depends on your opinion of the relative popularity of gaming versus media consumption).
The regulatory / data locality angle is more likely to be the main driver for needing more data centers beyond the latency requirements. Otherwise, most customers just don't have the bandwidth requirements to necessitate a large facility.
Again, Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.