SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE

Twelve years keeping these racks alive, Patched through midnight, no nine to five, Then a quote lands, ten times the cost, Perpetual promise, permanently lost.

They bought the platform, they bought the keys, Now it’s pay per core, or down on your knees.

We built it all on borrowed ground, Now the rent is due and the walls close round, Every core is counted, every socket taxed, Sign the dotted line, there’s no turning back, So read it twice, and read it slow, Here’s your renewal notice, now you know.

Finance asking what it means, Three more zeroes on the screen, I say we’re hostage to the stack we chose, Locked in tighter as the invoice grows.

They bought the platform, they bought the keys, Now it’s pay per core, or down on your knees.

We built it all on borrowed ground, Now the rent is due and the walls close round, Every core is counted, every socket taxed, Sign the dotted line, there’s no turning back, So read it twice, and read it slow, Here’s your renewal notice, now you know.

There was a handshake once, a fair exchange, Now the fine print shifts like desert sand, I keep the lights on, I don’t make the rules, But I won’t forget the ones who moved the goals.

We built it all on borrowed ground, Now the rent is due and the walls close round, Every core is counted, every socket taxed, Sign the dotted line, there’s no turning back, So read it twice, and read it slow, Here’s your renewal notice, now you know.

Read it twice, and read it slow, The second Tuesday’s coming, don’t you know.

Patch Tuesday, hold your breath and pray, The ring hangs frozen, thirty on the dial, One cumulative update took the whole domain away, Now every single login’s in denial.

Second Tuesday of the month rolls in, The bulletins stack like a quiet sin, Staging was green so we pushed it wide, Then the domain controller flatlined mid ride.

Patch Tuesday, hold your breath and pray, The ring hangs frozen, thirty on the dial, One cumulative update took the whole domain away, Now every single login’s in denial.

Rollback rides on a snapshot, old, Safe mode boots to a screen of gold, The known issue posts at four a.m., “Workaround pending”, cheers again.

Every fix ships something broken, Every caveat goes unspoken, A thousand admins share this weather, Same stuck spinner, we suffer together, I trust the notes as far as I can throw them, If there’s landmines in this rollout, we will know them.

Patch Tuesday, hold your breath and pray, The ring hangs frozen, thirty on the dial, One cumulative update took the whole domain away, Now every single login’s in denial.

Patch Tuesday, hold your breath and pray, The ring hangs frozen, thirty on the dial, One cumulative update took the whole domain away, Now every single login’s in denial.

Green at last, log off, get some sleep, If it breaks again tonight, they’ll only call me.

Nobody knows where the backups live, Nobody else holds the master key, The diagram’s a decade out of date, And every arrow points at me, The vendor changed, the budget shrank, The team got thin, the scope got wide.

The new hires only know the cloud, The old guard took the redundancy, The wiki answers every question with my name, Trace it, cable to core, line by line, you’ll see, I’m the single point of failure.

They call it tribal knowledge like it’s free, Like it didn’t cost me years of broken sleep, Like it isn’t heavy, being load-bearing quietly.

I document at midnight, train the ones who’ll stay, Hand over the crown jewels, piece by careful piece, But the pager still defaults to me, Trace it, cable to core, line by line, you’ll see, I’m the single point of failure.

If I win the lotto, if the bus arrives, The joke stops being funny when it’s how the place survives, So ask me for the handover before you have to guess.

So I build the runbook no one reads, I mirror every secret, share the load I can, One day this floor won’t need my key, Trace it, cable to core, line by line, you’ll see, I’m the single point of failure.

Cable to core, it’s still me, So I’ve quoted us some headroom, wait and see.

Spec’d a host refresh back in autumn, right, DDR5, nothing exotic, nothing bright, Procurement pinged me back with a laugh and a half, Said the RAM alone costs a server and a half.

Sticker shock, read the quote again, Same old modules, triple what they’ve been, Six week lead time, budget’s blown sky high, The AI farms just bought the world’s supply.

Hyperscalers eating every fab alive, Every stick of silicon pre-sold by five, We’re down the food chain fighting for the scraps, Refreshing vendor pages, watching pricing graphs.

Sticker shock, read the quote again, Same old modules, triple what they’ve been, Six week lead time, budget’s blown sky high, The AI farms just bought the world’s supply.

Boss says surely we can just make do, Till the app team ships build twenty-two, Which eats another sixteen gig per node, Or “just burst to the cloud”, oh here we go.

Sticker shock, read the quote again, Same old modules, triple what they’ve been, Six week lead time, budget’s blown sky high, The AI farms just bought the world’s supply.

So I hoard the spares like bars of gold, Label every module, young and old, Decommission nothing, always strip it first, In the great memory drought you plan for the worst.

Sticker shock, read the quote again, Same old modules, triple what they’ve been, Six week lead time, budget’s blown sky high, The AI farms just bought the world’s supply.

Read the quote again... yeah nah, still cursed.

Lift and shift, they said it’d be a breeze, Opex over capex, sign it if you please, Three years later there’s a line item zoo, Sixty services billing, we use twenty-two.

Autoscale’s a lovely word, Till the scale goes only up.

The meter’s always running, soft and low, A dollar for the data walking out the door, Nobody remembers what that bucket holds, But we’ve been paying rent on it since twenty-four, They sold us all the sky by the hour, Now the sky sends invoices to the floor.

Found a dev environment from twenty-three, Running hot on premium SSD, Snapshots of snapshots, orphaned and unowned, A small nation’s GDP in storage cold.

Autoscale’s a lovely word, Till the scale goes only up.

The meter’s always running, soft and low, A dollar for the data walking out the door, Nobody remembers what that bucket holds, But we’ve been paying rent on it since twenty-four, They sold us all the sky by the hour, Now the sky sends invoices to the floor.

I’m not against the cloud, it earns its keep, For the bursty and the spiky it’s a dream, But somebody has to watch the taxi meter tick, Counting every second like a scheme.

The meter’s always running, soft and low, A dollar for the data walking out the door, Nobody remembers what that bucket holds, But we’ve been paying rent on it since twenty-four, They sold us all the sky by the hour, Now the sky sends invoices to the floor.

The meter never sleeps... and nor do I.

The bed is warm, the phone is not, Severity one on a service I forgot, I know this alert like an old scar aches, Same array, same mistake.

Kiss her shoulder, slip into the hall, Laptop glowing like a distress call, Fingers typing what the muscle knows, While the kettle hums and the tension grows.

One eye open, Red light glow, Heart already running Before I even know, The house is still and breathing, The suburb’s dead to the world, And the only two awake right now Are me and the three a.m. pager.

By four the graphs are levelling out, I write the timeline, strangle the doubt, Crawl back to bed as the magpies wake, Two hours left, that’s all it takes.

One eye open, Red light glow, Heart already running Before I even know, The house is still and breathing, The suburb’s dead to the world, And the only two awake right now Are me and the three a.m. pager.

Nobody sees this shift, No medal for the save, Just the lights still on come morning, And the sleep I never gave.

One eye open, Red light glow, Heart already running Before I even know, The house is still and breathing, The suburb’s dead to the world, And the only two awake right now Are me and the three a.m. pager.

The suburb’s dead to the world... and the lights stayed on.

Instrumental.

Exodus, we’re moving out tonight, Live-migrating everything by low blue light, You tripled on the faithful, so we drew the line, The cluster’s got a new home, and the new home’s mine.

Six months of testing on a spare old rack, Open hypervisor, no turning back, Failover drills till the runbook’s clean, Tightest migration this floor has seen.

Exodus, we’re moving out tonight, Live-migrating everything by low blue light, You tripled on the faithful, so we drew the line, The cluster’s got a new home, and the new home’s mine.

The rep keeps calling with a discount now, Funny how the pricing finds a heart somehow, Too late, mate, the ink is dry, Keep the bundle, we’ll keep our uptime high.

No hard feelings, it’s business, you said, With your hand in our pocket while you patted our head, So here’s a little business from the other side, In a maintenance window, watch the last guest ride.

Exodus, we’re moving out tonight, Live-migrating everything by low blue light, You tripled on the faithful, so we drew the line, The cluster’s got a new home, and the new home’s mine.

Exodus, we’re moving out tonight, Live-migrating everything by low blue light, You tripled on the faithful, so we drew the line, The cluster’s got a new home, and the new home’s mine.

The last host powers down tonight, And we’re not done bringing things home.

Three years of invoices taped to the wall, Egress and storage and support on call, The CFO went pale at the annual sum, Said find me an exit, so I found her one.

Bring it home, bring it back on-prem, We ran the numbers, then we ran them again, Steel of our own beats renting from them.

Priced out the colo, the power, the pipe, Half the yearly cloud spend, payback in sight, Kept a burst lane hot for the seasonal spike, Hybrid where it helps us, owned where we like.

Bring it home, bring it back on-prem, We ran the numbers, then we ran them again, Steel of our own beats renting from them.

Pallets arrived on a Tuesday morn, Box-fresh silicon, a data hall reborn, Cable by cable we built it true, Every port labelled, documented too.

Bring it home, bring it back on-prem, We ran the numbers, then we ran them again, Steel of our own beats renting from them.

Now the graphs are boring and the bill is flat, Latency’s tiny and I’m proud of that, The cloud still earns the jobs that fit, But the crown jewels sleep where I can sit.

Bring it home, bring it back on-prem, We ran the numbers, then we ran them again, Steel of our own beats renting from them.

Steel of our own, humming in the dark... welcome home.

The year they tried to squeeze us dry, New owners, new invoices, new walls, We patched and moved and brought it home, And nobody clapped, but nothing fell.

For every silent save at three a.m., For every green that no one stops to see, For the mates in other server rooms tonight, Holding up their little worlds invisibly, We kept the lights on, through the year that shook, Five nines, and the last nine’s you and me.

So raise a glass to the quiet crew, The pager carriers seeing it through, To every admin sweating on a change, The whole world runs across your midnight range.

For every silent save at three a.m., For every green that no one stops to see, For the mates in other server rooms tonight, Holding up their little worlds invisibly, We kept the lights on, through the year that shook, Five nines, and the last nine’s you and me.

Ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, Five minutes a year we’re allowed to fall, We spent four of them in March, remember, And laughed about it after all.

They can buy our platforms, jack the price of RAM, Meter every packet leaving every port, They can rename the licences and shake us down, They still can’t do the job we do, and that’s the sport.

For every silent save at three a.m., For every green that no one stops to see, For the mates in other server rooms tonight, Holding up their little worlds invisibly, We kept the lights on, through the year that shook, Five nines, and the last nine’s you and me.

Keep the lights on... it’s what we do.