cloud

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

The official Kubernetes documentary, part 1, tells how a handful of Google engineers, inspired by Docker's success, built a container orchestrator. It covers the internal resistance to open source and the competition of the container orchestrator wars.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

A QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

Overclocker der8auer tours Hetzner's Falkenstein data center in Germany, showing custom racks, own mainboards, passively cooled servers and ATX-style cases on shelves.

Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

The author of copyparty introduces the FOSS file server he has built over five years, demoing its features such as resumable uploads, WebDAV and deduplication. The video itself is shown running on a demo server.

Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

A walkthrough of installing Synapse, Riot and Jitsi from scratch on Debian to run your own Matrix communication service. The description warns it is now quite outdated and links to updated material.

A fasterthanlime video essay arguing that GitHub Actions is a poorly designed system, with a history of personal computing and CI, and a look at how it works behind the scenes. It is sponsored by Brilliant.

Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

A KRAZAM comedy sketch in which a character recites reassuring affirmations to site reliability engineers, satirizing on-call and outage culture.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

A Netflix engineer describes how Netflix uses Java in 2025, including Spring Boot, DGS/GraphQL, gRPC and keeping over 3000 services on the latest JDK. It covers generational ZGC upgrade experiences.

Level1Techs' Wendell shows Intel's Flex 170 GPU providing GPU-accelerated virtual desktops on Proxmox 8.1 without subscription licensing, using SR-IOV, and demonstrates many desktop instances running at once.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains climate sensitivity and why recent observations suggest climate models may have underestimated warming. She says this changed her view on how worried to be.

A WSJ investigation by Joanna Stern into iPhone thieves who watch victims enter their passcode, then use it to lock them out of Apple accounts and drain bank and payment apps. It explains how the thefts work and how to protect yourself.

The Thought Emporium follows up on his earlier video showing negative ion products are radioactive, reporting that Amazon pulled listings and companies shut down. He tests more radioactive quack products with a Geiger counter and cloud chamber.

A short Reuters news clip showing declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It shows the blast and the mushroom cloud.

A one-minute Rheinmetall promotional demo of Oerlikon Ahead air burst ammunition, which throws a cloud of sub-projectiles to destroy small air targets.