Kelsey Hightower

A lot of the customer base was like people hosting their own game servers, right?

So if you wanted to play a game, one thing you could do back then is host a game server, but you needed a game server that multiple people could hit.

And so you would go along to server beach.

So this is a spin out of Rackspace.

So Rackspace is more like, you know, we'll buy a server and once you get it and it's a lot of manual steps.

Rackspace was more of a, let's automate everything.

So the machine would pixie, some PHP scripts would run.

If you ordered a RAID setup, then we would configure the RAID while the machine was netbooted.

And then we would put you on the VLAN that you belonged on.

We would install the right operating system based on what you've ordered.

And we just took a form.

We just went through all of these steps.

And then when we were done, and it took maybe about an hour, when we were done, you had an IP address, login credentials.

And if you wanted email and plus, you know, website management, all these things, you got it.

And when you were done, you gave it back.

And then we put it back into the pool, ready for the next customer.

And so when I saw how we were doing that, I was like, yo, this is...

Okay, you can automate things end to end.

The other thing that was important here, we were doing things like updating the firmware for RAID controllers.

Because once you pixie a server, now you're in memory and you have access to all the hardware.