We landed a robot on a comet. The ESA’s Philae probe, after a ten-year journey, touched down on a comet moving 84,000 mph, then its harpoons didn’t fire, it bounced twice across the comet in micro-gravity, and settled in a shadow where its solar panels can barely charge. It still sent back science before sleeping. Ten years of planning, one anchoring failure, heroic degraded-mode operation. It’s the most engineering story ever told and I’ve read every detail.
Down here on Earth, AWS’s re:Invent conference announced something called Lambda: you upload a function, just a function, and Amazon runs it when events happen. No servers to manage at all. The ops guys are split between “toy” and “this changes everything.” I ran a hello-world and the mental model shift is real: I didn’t provision anything. Watch this space.
(Also Azure had a rough global outage this week, a storage config change gone wrong. Even giants trip on config. Especially giants.)
TIL: event-driven architecture, for real. Lambda forced it: no server sitting there, just “when X happens, run Y.” Philae is event-driven too, if you think about it. Everything good is.