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When the Safety Net Snaps
It happened again. The one thing that’s not supposed to go down … went down. This morning, Cloudflare — the safety net of the internet, the infrastructure under the infrastructure — tripped over itself and faceplanted. If AWS is the backbone, Cloudflare is the connective tissue. It’s the silent middle layer that makes sure your site doesn’t go dark when other things do. Except today, it did. And when Cloudflare stumbles, it’s not just one site that goes offline — it’s an ent

Rich Washburn
Nov 184 min read


From Solder Smoke to Silicon Clouds
This all started with a phone call. An old friend of mine, Boris — a fellow IBM alum and one of the few people who still remembers what IRQ conflicts felt like — called me out of the blue a few weeks back. He had a question about AI. Simple enough. But if you’ve ever talked to two lifelong tech guys, you know how that goes. Five minutes in, we were no longer talking about AI — we were talking about everything that led to AI . We fell straight down the nostalgia rabbit hole: A

Rich Washburn
Nov 87 min read


AWS 311-DOWN-DOWN
When us-east-1 Sneezes, the Internet Gets a Cold At exactly 3:11 AM this morning—because apparently the cloud has a flair for irony— Amazon Web Services’ us-east-1 region tripped over its own DNS resolver and faceplanted, taking half the internet down with it. For those of us of a certain age, sipping our morning coffee while watching dashboards fail to load, there was only one thing going through our heads: 🎶 Gonna take the internet down… down… 🎶 Yes. 311. The band. The

Rich Washburn
Oct 203 min read


The Beginning of the End of the Cloud Empire
Let’s be clear: the cloud isn’t dying. But the age of unquestioned cloud supremacy — that decade-long reign where every ounce of intelligence had to pass through someone else’s API — that’s beginning to crack. We’re entering the post-imperial phase of compute. The Great Inversion For twenty years, the cloud has been the empire of cognition: centralized, industrial, and rented by the teraflop. It made sense. The economics of scale were brutal. Training frontier models requir

Rich Washburn
Oct 202 min read


Psst… You Got Some Compute?
Stuck in line while the tech bro crowd is already building the future? Tech titans like OpenAI, Google, Meta—are stockpiling GPUs like...

Rich Washburn
Feb 191 min read


Powering the AI Revolution: Why Data Centers Are the Hottest Investment on the Planet
The artificial intelligence boom isn't just transforming industries—it’s reshaping the very backbone of the digital world. Nowhere is...

Rich Washburn
Feb 183 min read


RouteLLM: Lower Costs, Better Performance
Innovations that promise significant cost savings and efficiency gains are always worth a closer look. One such innovation that has...

Rich Washburn
Jul 23, 20242 min read


Generative AI: The Hype is Real and So Are the Opportunities
Generative AI has rapidly transitioned from a nascent technology to a transformative force, and the buzz surrounding it is well-deserved....

Rich Washburn
Jul 11, 20243 min read


Inside Microsoft’s $100 Billion AI Data Center Gold Rush
AI is witnessing an unprecedented surge in investment & innovation, with Microsoft & OpenAI at the forefront. Recently, leaked reports...

Rich Washburn
May 23, 20243 min read


Azure Virtual Networks, NSG Creation
Microsoft Azure offers robust networking capabilities to build secure and scalable cloud solutions. Virtual networks (VNETs) provide the...

Rich Washburn
Oct 18, 20232 min read
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