Chevre, this week’s parsha is בְּשַׁלַׁח (BeShalach). We have the destruction of the Egyptian army (aka, the on-prem data centers are cleared out) and the song sung by the Israelites after the destruction. We can think of all the folks that used to spend 1/2 their time running the data center and the other 1/2 trying to get work done as so happy now that they can focus on their work and don’t have to crawl under floors running cables for that new shiny server that will be under utilized.
There is a passage in the parsha that bothered me. It states “And the Isrealites ate manna forty years, until they came to settled land; they ate the manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan.” (Shemot 16:35) What bothered me is that we don’t learn about the 40 years in the desert until Bamidbar, much later, but I was not able to find any commentary (either in my library or using Sefaria.org and their online version; my breakfast table ended up covered in books, coffe cup, tablet, you get the picture) that discusses this. All I could find was the discussion about why eating is mentioned twice and how was the 40 years calculated. The easy-out answer (which I don’t like) is that there is no before/after in the Torah and HaShem knows everything. While I don’t have an answer to my question, these discussions did highlight for me that the important thing is not always the destination, but sometimes the journey. When we help our customers migrate from on-prem to the cloud, they have many opportunities to learn more deeply how their systems interact with each other, to improve while lifting-and-shifting and/or to refactor along the way (or afterwards) to improve their workloads for scaling, cost optimization and other performance measures. While I hope it doesn’t take 40 years for our customers to go through these transformations, they can rest assured that they will have us as their guide like the Bnei Yisrael had Moshe (and his brother Aharon and sister Miriam) as theirs. What is very interesting in these commentaries is that the water dried up when Miriam died and the Manna stopped coming with Moshe died. The sustenance of the people were directly linked to the support of these people. And we need to remember that many times the success of our customers can be directly linked to the support we give them. Shabbat Shalom.
BeShalach - 2021