On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.

I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.

Technical concerns aside, the main risk is financial. Success is based on the premise that we need this enough that the costs are justified but the costs are going to be much higher. That is totally unproven on any financial modelling scenario I've seen. In fact there's likely no actual ROI on what has been spent so far and no qualification of demand. With geopolitical problems on the table, no one is going to fund this.

The idea is completely dead before the first node leaves the planet.

There's a nice emulator here, a WebAssembly RiscPC one. Works quite well: https://rpcemu.m-h.org.uk/

I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.

Our management team bought the idea right up.

I didn't say anything despite having professional qualifications in mathematics and statistics. 5 years ago I might have done. Now I know it's futile. Last time I tried to stand up for integrity over bullshit I got the full management language tirade thrown back at me for daring to question it. I realised after a bit that it's a fragile house of cards and if you push it the entire thing will go and they are doing everything they can to keep it standing.

This was so soul-crushing that I decided I was just going to fuck around and get paid until I get fired. See how long I can stretch it out. By doing that I'm doing less damage than they are.

This is why we're slowly and quietly moving back to a couple of cages in a DC. Well we were until the AI companies bought all the fuck RAM and SSDs.

It is about 8x more expensive to run it on AWS than it was on actual hardware. And that's using their reference architecture and designs. And the sprawling nature of AWS services and uptake makes it pretty damn hard to get out. We are slowly and quietly migrating everyting to IaaS / kubernetes so we can get it out again. Just moving to kubernetes and packing stuff tight on EKS and thus kubernetes has shaved 30% of our costs off already.

We were sold a lie and fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Edit: also fuck things like Lambda. It's literally the most horrible experience that the universe can muster. Moved most of our lambdas to simple boring http services on top of Go and just leave 20 instances running. Just not having to deal with CloudWatch saved us more money than Lambda could have.

Turns out it did.

Thus we should probably start treating our thinking model of computing as a Dark Forest, not a friendly community. That mitigates these risks to some degree.