What We Gave Up When We Got Infinite Scale

Server fans and project plans

I remember the hum of the server room in the early 2000s. It was a physical, vibrating thing (a literal heartbeat for the company) that required us to care for it with a level of intimacy that seems absurd now. If we wanted to grow, we had to go buy a Dell PowerEdge and physically bolt it into a rack. We were limited by the length of the cables and the …