[vcf-midatlantic] OT: modern cloud services

[Ethan O'Toole]

> No. Dude ... do you understand how big cloud computing is? Gartner found
> that it was a $260 BILLION industry in 2017.
> For emphasis: TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS.

Indeed. Also, when it comes to skillsets at my prior employer one of the 
managers said it was more difficult to hire people as we didn't use cloud 
stuff much. Potential candidates look at the skillsets they will gain and 
maintain. AWS (and I suppose GCP and Azure) are hot, pick up the skills if 
possible!

AWS is so crazy big it's not funny. What they offer is crazy powerful. 
Companies like IBM are dust. AWS has their own silicon in production now 
that sits next to the Intel CPUs for a bunch of crazy customized support. 
So each virtual machine sees it's own NVME storage but that is really tied 
to a SAN outside of the silicon to NVME over IP or whatever. Way more 
isolation than relying on VMs.

In my research on AWS Glacier it appears they use special hard drives that 
spin at lower speeds, and then power down the disks when full? The disks 
are connected to custom multiplexors. But there might be optical or tape 
in the mix somehow? Another service that makes me wonder how they do it.