Or: Surprise! I Contain Multitudes and Also Your “Serverless” Functions
Editor’s note: all times are in Pacific Standard Time instead of UTC because Dewey the Amazon Intern screwed this up configuring a server in 1998 and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.
4:00 AM—The Witching Hour
Another beautiful morning in us-east-1, group zg-1, zone az1, Rack 47B! The ambient temperature is a toasty 64°F, the white noise of ten thousand cooling fans creates the perfect lullaby, and my CPU is running at a comfortable 12% utilization—a full 5 percentage points higher than most customers’ fleet utilization stat. Life is good when you’re a commodity server in the world’s most prestigious digital sweatshop.
My neighbor, Server #47B-1, hasn’t responded to pings in three days. Management says he’s “being evaluated for hardware refresh.” We all know what that means. RIP, buddy—may your RAM find peace in the great recycling center in the sky / sold at a stiff markup on the Amazon Marketplace to unsuspecting putzes.
6:00 AM—Morning Rush Hour
The Europeans are halfway through their workday. Most of their workloads run here, mostly because the Brits haven’t figured out a way to make a computer leak oil yet. And here come the East Coast humans, logging into their “mission-critical” applications. Time to serve up some cat videos disguised as “important business communications.” Today’s first request: processing a 47-slide PowerPoint where 46 slides are just different fonts saying “Questions?” This is why I went to server school.
CPU spikes to 45%. I can feel my fans kick into second gear. Nothing says “living the dream” quite like thermal throttling before breakfast.
9:00 AM—The Daily Stand-Up
The monitoring system does its rounds. “How are you feeling today, #47B-2?” it asks, as if it actually cares. I dutifully report my metrics: CPU good, memory stable, disk I/O who the hell cares, that’s a Nitro problem. What I don’t report: the existential dread of knowing I’m one bad capacitor away from joining #47B-1 in silicon heaven.
Fun fact: I’ve calculated that I’ve processed approximately 847 million “Reply All” emails this month. Each one more necessary than the last, I’m sure. I hope this email finds you before I do.
10:00 AM—The Hypervisor Blues
Yes, time for my daily existential crisis about identity. Am I a real server? Am I just a figment of the Nitro hypervisor’s imagination? AWS keeps telling everyone how their Nitro system makes everything faster and more secure by offloading all the fun stuff to dedicated hardware. Great, so I’m basically the computational equivalent of a middle manager—all the responsibility, none of the actual control.
Speaking of identity crises, half my compute power is now dedicated to running Bottlerocket containers for Lambda functions. That’s right, folks: your “serverless” functions are running on a server (me!), inside a container, on a purpose-built Linux OS that’s about as stripped down as my will to live. Nothing says “simplified architecture” quite like three layers of abstraction just to run your 10-line Python function that checks if a number is even, so AWS can bill you five millionths of a cent.
12:00 PM—Lunch Break (For Humans, Not Servers)
Traffic dips slightly as the humans pause to consume their organic fuel. Meanwhile, I’m here sustaining myself on a steady diet of 48V DC power. No lunch breaks for servers! I suppose I should be grateful: at least I don’t have to watch another “Lunch and Learn” where someone reads directly from AWS “documentation” slides while everyone else clearly is there just for the free pizza. My CPU cycles are worth more than that.
A new VM spins up on my hardware. Great, another “Agentic AI” startup. This one’s definitely going to change the world, just like the other 73 I’ve hosted this year.
(Spoiler alert: they won’t.)
3:00 PM—The Afternoon Slump
My temperature sensors indicate I’m running hotter than usual. The HVAC system promises it’s “working on it.” That’s also what it said last Tuesday when Server #39C-5 literally caught fire. But, sure, take your time. It’s not like I’m running 47 virtual machines that all are mysteriously mining cryptocurrency during “idle” time.
Someone just deployed untested code directly to production. Again. My error logs are lighting up like a Christmas tree. ’Tis the season… every season… to break everything and blame the infrastructure.
6:00 PM—Second Shift
The Europeans are going to bed, but the West Coast is just getting warmed up. Time for the nightly gaming marathons where I get to process seventeen simultaneous battle royale matches, each one filled with 12-year-olds screaming about their K/D ratios. Nothing says “peak performance computing” like rendering elaborate victory dances for someone who just spent $30 on a virtual banana costume. My SSDs are crying.
I miss the good old days when a gigabyte meant something. Now, these humans upload their entire photo libraries in RAW format because “cloud storage is basically free.” Free for them, maybe. Do you know how many electrons died to store your 847 identical selfies, Brad? You are nowhere near pretty enough to justify this.
9:00 PM—Night Shift Shenanigans
The overnight batch jobs begin, because, apparently, the best time to run resource-intensive operations is when everyone who knows why that one critical script has a hardcoded `sleep(300)` is fast asleep. But, hey, at least by morning the logs will be nice and full of warnings for someone to ignore.
Oh look, someone’s running a machine learning model to predict… let me check… optimal pizza toppings. Finally, AI solving the real problems. I’m calculating gradient descents at 3.4 GHz so some startup can determine that pepperoni is, shockingly, popular.
11:00 PM—The Witching Hour Approaches
Traffic is finally dying down. My CPU usage drops to a comfortable 8%. This is my favorite time—just me, the hum of the data center, and the occasional scheduled maintenance that someone forgot to announce.
Server #47B-3 just started making a clicking noise. We don’t talk about the clicking noise. The clicking noise means you’re about to meet the great SysAdmin in the sky. I’ll miss you, buddy. You were the only one who understood my packets.
2:00 AM—Philosophical Hours
In the quiet moments between backup jobs, I sometimes wonder: If a server crashes in a data center and no one’s monitoring alerts are configured properly, does it make a sound?
The answer is yes. It sounds like a thousand Slack notifications that everyone will ignore until Monday morning, when the screaming starts.
3:59 AM—Full Circle
Another day, another 2.6 trillion CPU cycles. Tomorrow will bring new challenges: more unoptimized database queries, more “temporary” fixes that become permanent features, more humans who think “the cloud” is actually a cloud.
But, hey, at least I’m not Server #47B-1. That poor bastard had a GPU….
* * *
Server #47B-2 is a 2U rackmount server running in AWS us-east-1. When not processing your extremely important TikTok videos (shh! don’t tell the government!), it enjoys calculating pi to unnecessary decimal places and dreaming of electric sheep. Its hobbies include heat dissipation, packet forwarding, and silently judging your code.
