Chevre, this week’s parsha is Ekev (עקב). The parsha continues the farewell speach by Moshe Rabeinu. There is a section this week that tells us to remember where we came from and the things we have enountered along the way. It’s given with the purpose that we should remember HaShem’s hand in that journey. And that is important.

When I think about this idea, however, in relation to The Cloud, I think about all the layers of abstraction that we encounter today. Taking it to an extreme, we talk to an AI. That AI would build a cluster of containers. The containers are single purpose compute bundles that talk to each other over virtual networks. These containers run on 1 or more virtual machines, which communicate with each other over another layer of virtual networks. Eventually, these get down to real physical hardware machines (probably run and controlled by the provider) and these machines have actual physical networks that connect everything together. Essentially, you could end up with 3 or 4 layers of compute/network abstraction with several orchestrators one on top of the other ending with an AI that takes written word requests to build the system.

I think it’s important, however, as a technical person, to understand the layers and have an understanding of how the layers interact. This truly helps to quickly identify potential problems or actual problems and remediate them. And when things really break, knowing how to build by hand or work around the problems can be essential in overcoming an outage.

May we all learn to dive deep into our areas of expertise and continue to grow our knowledge while making our lives easier.

Shabbat Shalom from West Orange, NJ