Splitting light Season 2 Episode 02 Birth of team storage 💾 If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe The five of us had been tasked to build two new products in the short term. Object and block storage. What we had missed was that we would pick-up all the existing storage products as well. At the time, in the cloud department there had already been two tries at object storage, the first one had been a public offering based on RiakCS, a now defunct database. The...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 01 51 avenue Iena If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe November 2017, the cloud industry was now booming. AWS was 11 years old, Azure was 9 years old, GCP was 6 years old and Oracle Cloud was now 2 years old. For me, the adventure continued but on a different wavelength. I had jumped energy level, and it was a whole new light. The storage team was created. There were initially five of us. Me, the lead engineer, Théo the manager...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 40 Thirty years old If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe I did my last student loan payment in August 2017 just before turning 30 a few weeks later. 30 for me had a meaning. I had survived. I had accomplished and did things I enjoyed. It was time to give back to friends and family. I organized my birthday at my uncle who had a property in the south of France. Me at my birthday My goal was to bring all these different people...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 39 Pivot If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Around that time, a big change was being prepared inside Scaleway. What we named later, the pivot. It was decided that the company would pivot to only cloud offerings. Up to that point there had been two distinct offerings. Cloud offerings, billed by the hour, and dedicated offerings billed by the month. The biggest business was the second but the one with the most potential growth...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 38 ECMP / Tunneling If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe The network chips we used had many more features that we had implemented in software. As the complexity of how the devices were used and set up in production, it raised the rationale to use more and more of the advanced chip features. It’s one thing to have routing capability, it’s a better one to have multipath routing capabilities. The multipath capability enables...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 37 Upstream complexity If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe A big part of the work that goes into building hardware is the supply chain. It’s hard to fathom how complex and time sensitive it is without having worked on it. When we built a device, there could be several hundred components. Each of these had to be ordered, shipped and soldered on. Some components were only available in some countries because that’s where the...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 36 SerDes eye If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe My next assignment was making the 100 gigabit links of the router work. It broke my confidence and it eventually made me think I did not have the competence to work on hardware. Looking back, the issue was that even after all these successes, I still thought I was an imposter. This had caught back with me. To understand why this happened, I have to take many steps back. I had...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 35 Mending loose ends If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe I was nearing the mark of my third decade of being alive. Many things were getting better. I liked my work. I liked the team and the projects. I was nearing the last payments of my student loans. Since my graduation, six years before, my expenses had almost been split into three items. Rent, student loan and income taxes. Nearly a third of my income each. Even though I...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 1 Episode 34 Importance of upstreaming If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Once the second generation network device was working, the work to backport the new code library back to every other device began. That meant updating the codebase everywhere. This wasn’t too hard as the code was unified, only the configuration changed dynamically by looking at hardware flags or through communication with it using built-in protocols. Gen2 router...
2 months ago • 2 min read