The noise was so big, we couldn’t hear the phone ringing. Like a small jet engine firing nearby.
They were what’s called “Rack mountable 1U machines” - about 2″ high, 2 feet wide and about three feet deep. Cases looked like they were made from mesh - for better cooling. More on that later.
Why did we need them? And what's the server anyway?
Imagine opening a document on your laptop. How long does that take? A couple of seconds? Now imagine that document somewhere on the internet. And it’s not just you opening it, but about 100 people… all this very second. 100 requests per second.
How long will that take for everyone? What about these 100 people say to their friend, “hey check this out, this is so cool”. Now you have 1000 requests per second.
That poor computer has to send a version to each and everyone of those readers. Now of course, the smaller the document, the faster it goes. But what if half of these people want to edit the document or post their comments to it?
You’d have to have 1000 laptops to handle it.
A server is the same laptop but it’s built to open an insane amount of documents and quickly send them over not to the screen, but to the network connection. Down the wire so to speak.
Send them as fast as possible. “Serve” them to others. That means a server doesn’t really care about displaying the document on the screen, but rather “how do I take this file and send it over to as many different requests as possible. That’ means hardware has to be different - input/output optimized. But that’s just a small part of it.
The processor has to be able to clone itself - have multiple cores. A processor is basically a processor farm inside. Like a factory that looks like just one guy working. A guy with 16 different brains and 256 hands.
Serving all those hundreds of documents every second is a lot of work. A processor has to work very hard. It gets insanely hot. And when electronics get insanely hot, they fail. And when they fail, the server is no longer serving. It just sits there like a useless hunk of metal and customers are screaming, money lost, people die.
That's why a server has a built in redundancy. That means it has two power supplies, two input/output blocks, two network cards and so on. Plus they have to be cooled. See these black boxes in the picture on left and right? These are fans. They blow air through the entire machine, which is so thin because it’s easier to cool it.
Servers have to work 24/7. And they cannot accumulate dust, or the fans will get clogged. And when servers get old, they have to be replaced.
Now we have companies who manage those server farms and all these servers are sort of combined into a big server farm called CLOUD. So you don’t have to buy your own servers.
There’s some software that allows you to go online, click a button and have your own “virtual” server. Meaning you get a fraction of the server that looks like a real one.
And if you need more, it’s as simple as going online and moving a slider and multiplying your server power ten, twenty or even a hundred fold. Plus you can have a load balances between those servers. Which means if one, five or even twenty of those servers fail, nobody notices. There's no disruption.
Because, get this - there once was one big company that bought a lot of servers because they were selling a lot of books. But these servers were sitting idle most of the year except Christmas time. So the company decided to package them up using special software and offer all this computing power to you.
This company is called Amazon. And their server farm is called Amazon Web Services. You can go to their website and sign up for a year of “Free Tier” server service. That's like your own mini server farm. Other companies like Google and Microsoft were really embarrassed because a small book company invented this new technology. So they decided to launch their own clouds. But that’s a story for another time.
I'm only scratching the surface of what’s possible with computing power, storage power, email sending power and so on. Cloud architects get paid $120/hr to consult on moving companies to cloud and its a very interesting field because Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and new technologies is where the future lies. 1U is the smallest rack mounted unit you can have. You can go up to 2U, 4U, 8U. The power, the storage, the blocks are larger and more powerful. And they’re often used to back up your data to the cloud. Apple, Google Drive, Drop Box, Microsoft Azure use those types of servers. They can be used for pretty much any computing task. They power the internet, search engines, mobile networks, eBay, Amazon, Google. Entire banking system, Wall Street.
But you can take any of computer, install Linux on it, connect it to the internet and now you have your own server.
Just like Markus Frind did when he built the first free dating site “plenty of fish". He wanted to learn programming and he built a small ugly looking dating site and was serving it via his home DSL connection.
Ten years later this small free website was running smoothly on servers and he only had to work on it for one hour a day. It was generating $10 million a month in ad revenue.
He got bored with it and sold it for a half a billion and retired. Now he's making wine somewhere in the valleys of British Columbia.
Servers are powerful crows and if you can harness their power you can get insanely rich insanely fast. All you have to do is figure out what people want and just give it to them. And to figure that out, you need to study marketing and persuasion.
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