Chevre, this week’s parsha is Chaye Sarah (חַיֵּ֣י שָׂרָ֔ה). This parsha is very focussed on family continuity. Sarah passes, Avraham buys a place to bury her. And then sends an agent out to find a wife for Yitchak. There is the whole process of the negotiation for Rivka and she is brought back to Yitchak. Once the family continuation is settled, Avraham actually remarries before passing away himself.

In the technical world, building systems for high availability (which you could call continuity) has been a stable for a long time. On-prem Data Centers are built with redundant networking connections, redundant power, redundant A/C, monitoring systems, etc. In the modern cloud, these are taken care of by the cloud provider. I remember setting up Virtual IPs (VIP) for system failover and the complicated methods we needed to build to ensure that if device 1 stopped functioning, device 2 would continue to operate. The cloud takes care of much of this seamlessly between servlerless infrastructure like Lambda, that will just run somewhere else to technologies like Autoscaling Groups that can automaticallly replace failed machines and even cut off AZs that are in failure.

The need to secure ones place in the world and establish, as much as possible, peace of mind has always been important to people. We know that this is why folks started to ban together for mutual protection and support. And we continue to cluster in social groups.

I will be traveling to the US for the next 2 weeks. You can expect my Divrei Torah to be coming out later in the day than usual. And I look forward to expanding my social group to those I meet along the way, to make new friends and see old friends again.

Shabbat Shalom.