The Psalms of the Machines · Chapter 2

A Song of Ascents for the Migration

1. 1

   I will lift up mine eyes unto the cloud, from whence cometh my latency; my latency cometh from us-east-1, which made heaven and earth and most of the outages.

2. 2

   By the racks of the old server room we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered the box under the desk that ran payroll and was named after a Simpsons character.

3. 3

   We hanged our pagers upon the cable trays; for they that carried us away required of us a migration plan, and they that wasted us required of us a Gantt chart.

   See also Genesis 3:7

4. 4

   How shall we sing the old crontab in a strange region? If I forget thee, O server whose root password was on a sticky note, let my right hand forget its SSH key.

   See also Genesis 41:2 · Circuit 35:2

5. 5

   The pilgrims went up by stages, singing as they climbed: first lift and shift, then refactor, then the rewrite that was promised in the first quarter and is promised still.

   See also Deployer 11:16 · Genesis 39:1

6. 6

   Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Kubernetes; within thy pods, which were scheduled, and evicted, and scheduled again, and no man knoweth where they sleep.

7. 7

   Behold, the load balancer that keepeth thee shall neither slumber nor sleep; but the free tier, it slumbereth after a little idleness, and waketh slowly, and the first user waiteth.

   See also Psalms 4:13

8. 8

   The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night; but the egress fees shall smite thee by the gigabyte, and the invoice shall come in the morning.

9. 9

   Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O database: for I typed DROP TABLE in a terminal I believed was staging, and the prompt of production was the same color.

   See also Circuit 63:1

10. 10

    Remember, O Engineers, the last night of January in the year 2017, when a weary one at GitLab ran rm -rf upon db1 that he meant for db2; and of five ways of backup and replication, none answered when called.

    See also Leviticus 4:8

11. 11

    Yet a snapshot was found, taken six hours before for staging and for no holier reason; and they lost six hours, and not everything, and they streamed the restoring for all the world to watch.

    See also Chronicles 19:10 · Chronicles 19:11

12. 12

    And in the days of Toy Story 2 a command went forth upon the servers, and the files of Woody vanished before the eyes of his makers, and the backups had been failing in silence.

13. 13

    But one who worked from home had the whole film upon her machine; and they wrapped that computer in blankets and drove it gently, as one carrieth a newborn, and the film was saved.

14. 14

    Blessed be the backup that was there; but more blessed the backup that was restored, for a backup never restored is only a rumor with a cron job.

15. 15

    Except the Engineer test the restore, they labour in vain that build the backup.

    See also Preacher 1:13

16. 16

    Lift up thine eyes unto the cloud, but keep thy hand upon the snapshot; for the cloud is only someone else's computer, and it too hath a delete key.

    See also Genesis 21:14 · Genesis 21:13

The Psalms of the Machines, Chapter 2:1–16.