Kurt Mackey

You probably only need three of them, but you just gotta figure out which ones and how to string them together For like a Phoenix app on AWS, you're going to end up needing a VPC, which they'll give you by default these days. You need to know what a VPC is. You need probably either a Fargate or their Kubernetes setup to run the actual application. You need RDS.

You probably only need three of them, but you just gotta figure out which ones and how to string them together For like a Phoenix app on AWS, you're going to end up needing a VPC, which they'll give you by default these days. You need to know what a VPC is. You need probably either a Fargate or their Kubernetes setup to run the actual application. You need RDS.

You need an Elastic Load Balancer or an Application Load Balancer running in front of it. And on the other end of that, you've got the Heroku effect, which is like you can get a Rails app running. And this is like 2000. Amy was really excited about this. You can get a Rails app running really fast as long as it's Rails and as long as it uses Postgres.

You need an Elastic Load Balancer or an Application Load Balancer running in front of it. And on the other end of that, you've got the Heroku effect, which is like you can get a Rails app running. And this is like 2000. Amy was really excited about this. You can get a Rails app running really fast as long as it's Rails and as long as it uses Postgres.

And as soon as you need to do something else, you're like back in the AWS quagmire.

And as soon as you need to do something else, you're like back in the AWS quagmire.

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 primitives 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 primitives 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.