That's Not My Problem - I'm Renting Them
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 at 8:56AM 
Scott Hanselman gives a hilarious and insightful talk in Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler, a keynote at Velocity Santa Clara 2014. The topic of his talk is an intuitive understanding of the cloud and why it's the best thing ever.
At about 6:30 into the video Scott is at his standup comic best when he recounts a story of a talk Adrian Cockroft gave on Netflix’s move to SSDs. An audience member energetically questioned the move to SSDs saying they had high failure rates and how moving to SSDs was a stupid idea.
To which Mr. Cockroft replies:
That's not my problem, I'm renting them.
Scott selected the ideal illustration of the high level of abstraction the cloud provides. If you are new to the cloud that's a very hard idea to grasp. "That's not my problem, I'm renting them" is the perfect mantra when you find yourself worried about things you don't need to be worried about anymore.
Reader Comments (4)
Wait until Amazon send you emails that they are going to reboot your EC2 instances, then kept on changing the schedule on you.
Scott is a great speaker but that quip is a little too clever. You can pretend you're renting stuff if your application architecture is as robust as the Netflix artchitecture. I mean these guys are so paranoid about it that they wrote software to just go around and randomly destroy virtual machines running actual production code. That startup down the road doesn't have the same luxury and each one of their VMs is a special snowflake with no build and deployment pipeline in sight other than SSH and screen. If you don't understand the fundamentals then the cloud will not save you.
That attitude will not save you. Somebody has to care. Somebody has to keep those boxes running - and that somebody better know what she's doing.
And chaos monkey and the other members of the Symbian Army are all open source for that startup to leverage for free.