Instruction Manual for the Executioner

gistfile1.txt

# Instruction Manual for the Executioner

You knew that you would be the one to do this dirty
task.

You knew from the moment you saw the first warning
signs: the servers capable of handling thousands of
requests per second, but barely being utilized.

You knew from the moment the CEO called that morning
all hands meeting and announced that the company was
shutting down.

You knew all that afternoon, as you packed up your
things, and helped your coworkers reformat their work
machines for resale, and looked up prices on ebay to
see what the tables, and the chairs, and the computers
would sell for.

You knew as you dropped your keys on the table that
evening and took one last look around an office already
changed by the physical work of a few hours into an
alien environment: tables empty and pushed to the side,
naked without personal items, and computers, and books.

You knew as the lights turned off and the door shut
and that space that you spent years of your life in
and accomplished some of the best work of your life
within became a space you no longer had access to.

You knew a few days later in the comfort of home,
inbetween phone calls where you kept an upbeat tone
as new employers interviewed you about your technical
skills, and talked about how they would love someone
like you to work on their team.

You knew as you did a favor for the CEO who could no
longer afford to pay you by helping him modify the
landing page of the website: inserting a banner about
the "acquisition".

You knew that it would be you.

But now it is time.

This is the right thing to do. This creature that
you grew and nurtured and protected is ready to be
put down. It feels like murder, but is it really
possible to murder something already dead?

Anyone but you would find it surprisingly hard to
kill this creature.

You designed it to distribute itself across
availability zones such that even a minor natural
disaster would not kill it.

You designed it to be fault tolerant: to detect
problems within itself and excise the broken nodes
that were not functioning properly.

You designed it to be self-healing, such that if
one of its nodes became faulty or needed to be
terminated it would automatically repair itself by
spinning up a replacement.

And yet you hold the keys which will be used today
to turn off these carefully planned self-defense
mechanisms.

It is time.

You disable the auto scaling groups so that the
creature can no longer heal itself.

You click through each instance and verify that
termination protection is disabled.

Select All.

Terminate.

Confirm.

It only takes a few clicks to kill.

You watch the green status symbols turn from green,
to yellow, to red.

After a minute your phone is suddenly flooded with
texts and notifications.

Pingdom is warning that the website and API are down.

MMS is warning that the MongoDB monitoring and
backup agents are down.

In normal times these would have been the final
layer of self-defense that sent you scrambling to
the aid of the creature, helping it repair a problem
that it was not capable of solving by itself.

But now you are the executioner, and these messages
are ghostly pleadings from the creature you killed.

The notifications stop as you disable them one by
one and your phone is silent again.

But your mind is not silent, because you are left
haunted by memories of the hard work and hopes and
dreams that have finally died this day.

These memories will fade in time.

And then there will be another dream, and another
creature born from an idea and grown by you and
others like you: gods of an electrical universe,
creators and executioners.