Kurt Mackey

Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind the cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff, but you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.

Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind the cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff, but you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.

In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.

In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.

They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Like Lambda is really black boxy. You can't like pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside.

They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Like Lambda is really black boxy. You can't like pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside.

You have to sort of just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time.

You have to sort of just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time.

The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it. And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of.

The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it. And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of.

And what machines are is just these VMs. that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitive is actually there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.

And what machines are is just these VMs. that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitive is actually there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.

specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.

specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.

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Why does the cloud suck, Kurt? Well, there are a lot of clouds. Usually I'm lamenting when I say the cloud sucks, it's AWS and its competitors, Azure and GCP are just AWS again. Honestly, I think those clouds suck for me because I'm a developer. I'm not like a person who wants to operate cloud components. I'd rather just build apps and make them run, like put them somewhere.

Why does the cloud suck, Kurt? Well, there are a lot of clouds. Usually I'm lamenting when I say the cloud sucks, it's AWS and its competitors, Azure and GCP are just AWS again. Honestly, I think those clouds suck for me because I'm a developer. I'm not like a person who wants to operate cloud components. I'd rather just build apps and make them run, like put them somewhere.

Yeah, but that's not really what those clouds are for. And so the net effect is that if I launch like, I don't know, a Next app or a Rails app or a Phoenix app, as I would do lately, I don't even know where to start with this necessarily on AWS at this point. Like they have a catalog of like 400 products.

Yeah, but that's not really what those clouds are for. And so the net effect is that if I launch like, I don't know, a Next app or a Rails app or a Phoenix app, as I would do lately, I don't even know where to start with this necessarily on AWS at this point. Like they have a catalog of like 400 products.