Mayweather-Pacquiao finally happened Saturday, five years of hype, $100 pay-per-view, the biggest fight of the century, and the story of the night was infrastructure. The PPV systems buckled under record demand; the fight got delayed about 45 minutes so buyers could get through; Periscope and Meerkat filled with thousands of people just streaming their TVs, while the providers’ checkout pages 500’d. The boxing was cautious and forgettable. The load test was historic. Two brand-new livestreaming apps just showed an entire industry its own future and its own fragility in one night.
Tesla announced the Powerwall, a battery for your house, and pre-orders reportedly went ballistic. Elon’s pitch: solar by day, battery by night, grid optional. The infrastructure nerd in me notes: that’s edge caching for electricity.
Also Microsoft revealed their new browser is officially “Edge,” killing the Internet Explorer name after twenty years. IE dies as it lived: still installed, for compatibility.
TIL: what a “thundering herd” does to a checkout API, courtesy of every PPV postmortem thread. Same failure mode as Christmas PSN, SimCity, healthcare.gov. I keep watching different industries take turns learning identical lessons. Maybe that’s what this blog is actually about.