While we were working on the second generation, the Scaleway cloud team was busy building the software to be able to rent these machines as cloud instances billed by the hour.

I visited their office frequently. They were a team of twelve people building an information system as well as the required systems to boot the machines for a customer. As I clocked in on a year at the company, the dozen racks or so of the first generation were finally being fitted in a datacenter room at DC2. Behind the metal was more than ten thousand machines ready to be rented.

They required little power and were very dense. It only took a single row of racks to fit that many machines. I worked with the team to iron out the last details. A concerning one was with the storage medium that we had used to store the start instruction. We learned that NAND storage was not reliable enough for us to store these instructions. After checking multiple ways of increasing the reliability of the device, I eventually helped them be able to flash the storage in case it became too corrupted.
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It was now time. The team went to beta. I sent invites to a few friends which tested them a bit. A communication campaign was created. The lab and the factory were filmed and a movie was edited for the imminent launch.

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Then it went live. Tweets were written. Online press articles were submitted. A hacker news thread was published. We were instructed to upvote from our mobile device on mobile data as to not trigger spam protection mechanisms.

I was happy that the hardware was finally used but my job had been done for a few months. I wanted the cloud launch to work but it wasn't my code so I watched from a small distance. Even though I had been staying late at work, these few days, I stayed even later trying to help as much as I could.
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I loved the hardware and I was happy that we could show it around and be able to talk about it a bit. When the buzz settled a bit, I focused back on the second generation. We were making real progress and lessons from the first generation were, if not done already, integrated into the second version.
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The C1 was launched a bit more than ten years ago. How time flies.
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If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Made up my mind - Brassica
• Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John Drury Clark