Va’et’chanan

Chevre, this week’s parsha is וָאֶתְחַנַן (Va’et’chanan). As part of Moses’ summary in the book of Devarim, this week we have the repetition of the 10 commandments and the start of the Shema. There is an interesting section this week where we are told that when we enter The Land of Israel, we will be living in other people’s houses. During the war, the locals will either flee or be killed in battle and the Bnei Israel will take over their homes. We are warned to not forget HaShem. Given that we as users of the cloud do not actually build the infrastructure, we should not forget the basic tenents of computing. Things always break, you should have backups, and you should be prepared for high availability. Even though we didn’t build the data center and the infrastructure, these basic rules are still valid and we need to take them into account. I have had conversations with customers where they believe that things should always be up and I had to try to educate them. While we continue to build more and more services to try to protect our customers from these realities, it’s still possible and the customer knowing how their systems react during one of these outages is important. One of the important sections of the Shema is that we should teach our children. So the up and coming generation, while they may not feel the pain of a rack nut, should understand, even in the cloud, how to build and prepare for high availability. May we all be prepared for lifes “interesting” twists and turns. Shabbat Shalom.