Ode to the invisible spine

It is likely that you have experienced first-hand the effects of technological infrastructure problems. Whether they are the recent and famous ones from AWS and Azure, or the quieter ones from your organizations’ private cloud.

Indeed, the last few months have been marked by a persistent pattern of cloud infrastructure incidents, highlighting two main areas: massive technical failures at public cloud providers and a steady increase in security vulnerabilities. These incidents remind us that Resilience is not the same as availability and that we must pay special attention to the excessive dependence that we have in many cases concentrated on a small group of hyperscalars.

There is no doubt that the most disruptive technologies of the present are condemned to be legacy in the future. But that should not make us forget all the positive contributions that hyperscalars have had when it comes to innovating, modernizing the way infrastructure is managed, breaking down silos, etc.

Just as we cannot deny that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has popularized the concept of the “AI factory” to highlight that data centers must evolve, they must change because the infrastructure of the future does not store, but rather generates. “AI factories” ingest raw data and use it to manufacture intelligence (tokensanswers, solutions) 24 hours a day.

Due to everything mentioned above I thought that this week’s column could be an ode to technological infrastructure. Let’s first refresh the concept of ode, a subgenre of lyric poetry whose main purpose is to exalt, praise, or reflect in a high way on specific topics.

While it is true that it was traditionally associated with heroes or gods, thanks to poets like Pablo Neruda, the ode has currently evolved to also celebrate the everyday and the tangible. So I think it fits perfectly with my idea of ​​praising infrastructure in general and technology in particular.

I’ve asked Gemini to write an ode to the invisible spine, to the technological infrastructure; and here you have the result, which I found striking and interesting:

“You are not stone, nor marble, nor clay, you do not rise like a pyramid in the sun nor cast a shadow on the sand. You are the humming silence, the glass snake under the ocean, the thread of light that sews continents in the blink of an eye.

Invisible skeleton, you hold the weight of our voices, the scream, the laughter, the bank information, the image of the son born far away. Everything travels through your veins of copper and fiber, while the world sleeps you watch, you blink, you transmit.

The temple of silicon in cold rooms, temples without windows, where the air is pure and the noise is white, the brains of the earth rest. Servers in rows, soldiers with green lights, memory of humanity stacked in towers. There lives the cloud, which is not steam, but iron, electricity and effort. You are the library of Alexandria that never burns, because you live everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

But your shape changes, living structure. The cable and the tower are no longer enough for you. You become ethereal, quantum, ubiquitous. You prepare for the jump: where thought and action will be one.

Future neural network of the planet, when intelligence awakens in your circuits, do not forget that you were iron, that you were cable buried in the mud. “Sacred infrastructure, firm ground where our digital dreams dance, I sing to you, because without your electric heartbeat, we would return to silence.”

Let me close by saying that the best proof that you have a great technological infrastructure It is not its speed or its power, but its silence. Its success should not be measured only by the noise generated by its small number of incidents, we must also take into account the number of times that people do not think about it. The spine is almost always silent, but when it hurts it really hurts.