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> I remember watching Season 1 and Season 2, and thinking, why are these guys building their own servers? It doesn’t make sense. No one in this sort of world do
by apeace 9y ago
> I remember watching Season 1 and Season 2, and thinking, why are these guys building their own servers? It doesn’t make sense. No one in this sort of world does this.
I didn't react that way. I imagined that their workload was extremely CPU-intensive, and (due to their incredible compression) did not require a datacenter-grade network connection. So it makes financial sense to invest in your own hardware. Amortizing the cost of that hardware, a company like that could be saving tens of thousands per month versus AWS.
But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;)
Also, the scene at the end of season 2 where all the servers catch on fire was an incredibly memorable moment. I got emotional, being so invested in the characters and having my own memories of "putting out fires", and it was cathartic to see that team succeed and win the day.
- skrebbel 9y agoUmm, it was explained well in the story. Hooli was supposedly a major customer of all cloud providers and Gavin had pressured them to not sell VMs to Pied Piper. So they had no other option. The only hole in that story is that there's always too many hosting providers, you can't pressure all of them. But hey, it's a TV show.
- eanzenberg 9y agoAlso.. why would you place your proprietary "winning" algorithm on a machine owned by your biggest competitor?
- j_s 9y agoThis is a real concern for FPGA programmers considering Amazon EC2 F1.
- ericd 9y agoYeah, we built our own servers, it's not that hard, and you can save a huge amount of money. At the time, you couldn't get big SSD RAIDs and lots of RAM without paying a huge premium on AWS/Softlayer/etc. The payback period was like 6 months. Hosting them in your garage on a home internet connection... maybe not so much.
- atmosx 9y ago> But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;) Indeed. I took this another showcase for Gilfoyle's supreme skill. Indeed to this day, the guy that no-one never questions is Gilfoyle. Even in the last episode, Jared pitched Gilfoyle, not Dinesh for example.