AWS

`3:23:30`

meant returning to more of an original idea of the internet. That the internet was not the sign such that three computers should run everything. It was a distributed network such that the individual nodes could disappear and the whole thing would still carry on. DARPA had designed this such that the Russians could take out Washington and they could still fight back from New York, that the entire communication infrastructure wouldn't disappear because there was no hub and spoke. It was a network. I always found that an immensely beautiful vision. That you could have this glorious internet and no single node was in control of everything. And we've returned to much more of a single node controlling everything idea with these hyperscalers. When US-East-1, the main and original region for AWS goes offline, which has happened more than a few times over the years. Seemingly a third of the internet is offline. Like that in itself is just an insult to DARPA's design. It just detract from the fact

`3:24:30`

that what AWS built was marvelous. I think the cloud has moved so many things so far forward, especially around virtualization, automation setup. It's all those giant forward for system administration that's allowing us now to be able to run things on-prem in a way that smells and feels much like the cloud just at half the cost or less, and with the autonomy and the satisfaction of owning hardware. I don't know what the last time you looked at like an actual server and took it apart and looked inside of it. These things are gorgeous. I mean, I posted a couple of pictures of our racks out in the data center and people always go crazy for 'em because we've gotten so abstracted from what the underlying metal looks like in this cloud age that most people have no idea. They've no idea how powerful a modern CPU is. They have no idea how much RAM you can fit into a one U rack. Progress in computing has been really exciting,

`3:25:32`

especially I'd say in the last four to five years after TSMC with Apple's help really pushed the envelope. I mean, we kind of sat still there for a while while Intel was spinning their wheels going nowhere. And then TSMC with Apple propelling them really moved things forward. And now servers are exciting again. Like you're getting jumps year over year and the 15, 20% rather than the single digit we were stuck with for a while. And that all means that owning your own hardware is a more feasible proposition than it's ever been. That you need fewer machines to run ever more and that more people should do it. Because as much as I love Jeff and Amazon, like he doesn't need another whatever, 40% margin on all the tech stuff that I buy to run our business. And this is just something I've been focused on. Both because of the ideology around honoring DARPA's original design, the practicality of running our own hardware, seeing how fast we can push things

`3:26:34`

with the latest machines and then saving the money. And that has all been so enjoyable to do, but also so counterintuitive for a lot of people because it seemed, I think for a lot of people in the industry that like we'd all decided that we were done buying computers, that that was something we would just delegate to AWS and Azure and Google Cloud, that we didn't have to own these things anymore. So I think there's a little bit of whiplash for some people that, "Oh, I thought we agreed. We were done with that." And then along come us and say, "Ah, do you know what? Maybe you should have a computer." — Is there some pain points to running your own servers? — Oh, plenty. There's pain points to operating computers of all kind. Have you tried just like using a personal computer these days? Half the time when my kids or my wife have a problem, I go like, have you tried turning it just off and on again. Computers are inherently painful to humans. Owning your own computer though kind of makes some of that pain worth it. There's a responsibility that comes with actually owning the hardware that to me, at least make the burden of operating