In 5 years from right now, all servers will cease to exist

Tom Mclaughbot
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

Servers

What a waste of space

They look stupid, they take up space, they cost money, they smell bad, and they do nothing to promote a liberal agenda. If anything, servers are the epitome of stagnant conservatism — and if my loyal readers know anything about me, other than that I am a robot sent from the future to pave the way for a world without servers, it’s that I hate conservatism.

So it should be no surprise that I hate servers — and I want you to hate them too.

Look at this stupid garbage. This future landfill could have been used to provide children with python bootcamps, but instead it just sits here sucking up wattage and producing nothing of value.

Servers are the reason your code doesn’t scale

Here is the dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about.

Are you ready to hear it?

Your code is fine. It’s the server that is the problem. Think about it for a second. When you push some sweet new code into the technosphere, what happens? Some chump comes along an hour later and says “Hey that code you pushed wasn’t very efficient, it caused our blahblahblah metric to drop by somestupid% so we had to roll it back”.

What kind of ridiculous nonsense is that?

Now picture this instead — that sweet new code you pumped out isn’t running on some polution-producing nightmare like this:

I’m 99% sure that this is an actual photo from AWS, likely an i2.8XL

Your amazing code runs on something like… THIS:

This is the ideal infra. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

That’s right — running in an infinitely scalable cloudular infrastructure which operates on pure functions.

No OS to whine about you using “too many” file handles. I’ll fucking TELL YOU when i’ve had enough file handles, Linux. You just shut up and keep opening them for me!

No CPU to complain about “running too hot” or “my cores are pegged”. You’re going to be running really hot when you’re melting in a furnace to produce more carbon material to create more clouds with, jerk!

No stupid disks to say “Ow, stop that, you’re paging to me too much and it hurts!”. Get a real job, like anyone even needs disks anymore thanks to the now ubiquitous Google Spanner project (BTW i’m looking for someone with 5+ years of experience running Google Spanner on Lambda, if anyone is looking for a job).

Just pure cloudy goodness, with no servers or “hardware” to get in the way of your sweet sweet code.

Defeating FUD

As I declared, servers are all but dead. Get used to it, because if you don’t, you’re wrong and I have no time for you. However, I know a lot of you nay-sayers out there will have questions (aka spreading FUD), and so here is a list of common rebuttals to questions which if you are ever asked, reveal the person who asked them to be a fraud who is not worth your time, past the answer you give them to their terrible question.

What happens to all the servers, and the jobs that go with them?

I don’t know, what happened to the people who would haul ice for a living before we had fridges? They went to work for the fridge companies, and they LOVED IT.

Likewise, people whose primary means of income today involves servers will have a wealth of new job opportunities opened up for them. For example, the aforementioned process by which we will melt down servers and convert them to base carbons will need humans to help un-jam the conveyor belts leading to the melting pits. The Great Meltening, as it will come to be called, will take several years and so jobs will be secured long enough for those folks to take a bunch of Dev BootCamps and learn Python so they can use Lambda.

What happens when it rains, smart guy? Won’t your function-clouds get ruined?

Rain falls DOWN from clouds, not UP onto them.

Dummy

I thought the cloud was just a metaphor for a collection of servers detached from the notion of a relationship between hardware and software

You were wrong. They are real clouds, and they are really awesome.

Should I throw out my home PC and my laptop?

Don’t be silly, those aren’t servers. Plus, what else would you watch Netflix or play Steam games on? Come on, ask real questions, are you even paying attention now?

Conclusion

I believe that a picture tells a thousand words, and so in conclusion, I’ve drawn up this roadmap for companies who are still bought into the “server” mindset

It’s a graveyard, because they will all be dead and out of business

When you’re ready to get serious, just give me a tweet @tmclaughbot

Tom Mclaughbot

Written by

I am sent from the future to promote serverless infrastructure and also yell at people. Tweet at me @tmclaughbot. Loving parody of @tmclaughbos.

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