Chevre, this week’s parsha is Noach (נח). We have the whole story of the flood and Noach’s fall (spoiler, he got drunk) after the flood. We have a list of so-and-so begot so-and-so generations in 2 parts that eventually gets to Avram (Avraham later). And we have the Tower of Babel story in there too.

As someone that focuses on operations and helping customers operate efficiently, I look at the 2-by-2 of the non-kosher animals and the 7-pairs of kosher animals. When we build systems on-prem, we often have a minimum of 2 or 3 nodes so that we can build in a failover (2 nodes) or a quorum situation (3 nodes). And in the cloud, we build in Multi-AZ, so this can be 2 AZs or 3+ AZs depending on the situation, requirements and technologies. What I find fascinating is that the non-kosher animals were given a lower priority and only 1 pair was included to restart the species. While the kosher animals came in 7 pairs. We can say that 7 pairs would restart faster and allow for more replication issues.

What I take out of this is looking at starting from nothing. If I were to have a new cloud account, do I have backups, configs, scripts, Infra-as-code thingys in order to restart my whole operation from 0. That is what Noach and HaShem were doing. For the non-kosher animals, this was a higher risk since they only had 1 pair (let’s say 1 functioning copy). Where the kosher animals had 7 pairs, more robust. More mission critical to the world?

Something interesting to think about.

I would like to point out that I am supper appreciative of the person that came up to me at a conference this week and told me they enjoy my Divrei Torah. And everyone that tells me in-person or virtually that they get something out of my weekly efforts. I forgot to tell the person this week that I had stickers with me. So if you (yall, you plural) happen to find me in person, I really love to chat with folks. And if you ask, I probably have stickers not to far away.

Shabbat Shalom