Lift Heavy

Spend enough years as an engineer and you develop an unfounded confidence that you can handle just about anything.

A friend's company was pulling out of their IDC. I bought the whole rack — servers, contracts, and all. Never imagined that in 2026 I'd be doing physical server maintenance.

The friend is meticulous. Clean cabling, solid physical network design. Still, switch redundancy is a distant memory for me. I can barely recall router commands. Lately I've been letting AI handle even server configuration. It'll work out. Probably.

I'd been wanting to play with k3s. Build something like ECS/Fargate on my own iron. Upgrade the power, maybe shove a GPU in there. I was genuinely excited.

The spare equipment arrived. About thirty 1U and 2U servers. Brutally heavy. The 2U boxes look harmless enough but they're vicious — carrying them pushed my arms to failure.

Touch physical servers in the cloud-native era and you feel the weight of every abstraction software has built. Behind every command we type, someone ran cables. Someone calculated electrical capacity. Someone designed cooling. Power budget per rack, redundant path routing, airflow for heat exhaust. Behind docker run sits layer upon layer of physics. Forget that, and your architecture eventually loses its footing.

The next morning I rubbed my aching back and swore I'd get in shape. That friend always slips out before the after-party — he's efficient like that. It only hit me once my back seized up: he'd neatly offloaded the heavy lifting onto me.