OP — I’m not that privy to the details of what in the world was running on that MacBook Air, but I’m 100% sure it wasn’t “the production servers for Uber eats Canada.” It was some kind of hack doing some kind of thing on a recurring basis to make sure the service continued. These things were often hacked together by engineers, and sometimes ops people, in the middle of outages, as a stop gap.
There's a difference between "hosting all of Eats Canada" and "hosting some component or service until we can fix prod." I think it's more likely similar to the latter
that’s nothing! how about air traffic control in a text editor? <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzisy/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/comment/gnvzi...</a>
I’ve worked for big companies in the past where mission critical cron jobs were run on a Linux vm running off an old little desktop tucked away on a benchtop in the corner that no one ever noticed. Done to bypass various network controls to allow us to fix problems as they popped up. Absolute cowboy stuff, but effective.
I’m not surprised. Amazon payment service’s reconciliation and settlement system was run off of a developer desktop.<p>My memory is hazy as it was 18 years ago but I think it was due to some IP restrictions by banks and Amazon didn’t have tech to migrate IPs across machines.
It’s funny how people assume things. It seems odd that the assumption would be that this laptop runs production. I don’t think anyone who builds things with tech would assume this.
Legality aside I’d love how many people you could serve with $2000 worth of hardware (used or new) and a 1gbit up/down home internet connection With max p99 latency of 500ms.<p>It is strange that they didn’t at least use a Mac mini, but I assume they already had the hardware.
I was just reading in "Losing the Signal"[1] about how Blackberry's relay service of the late 1990s was sometimes run on a sysadmins laptop just because they needed anything to help deal with the traffic they weren't equipped to deal with.<p>[1] <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250096067/losingthesignal" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250096067/losingthesignal</a>
This was obviously temporary but is actually cool for showing how powerful modern machines actually are. People routinely underestimate the load that can be handled by one box properly configured and running efficient code.<p>I’ve found that modern developers almost always overestimate the amount of physical hardware needed to run things. I’m not sure why.
I'm perfectly fine with using laptops as edge servers in remote areas (Oh did you say Canada?). The thinkpad W series were workhorses, you could get 32GB of RAM and they had built in UPSs. Not that confident about Macbook Airs though, didn't they use to overheat?
even for 2015 (when this was likely taken) Uber Eats would most certainly <i>not have run</i> from a single laptop. Core services like dispatch, matching, pricing etc in any case weren't geography specific. If i had to guess, this was some Ops person running a local driver incentive, payout query + email workflow from their laptop.
I ran a national self-moving company’s website in the early days off of an original iMac with Apache on Mac OS X Server 1.0 (not a typo). Mostly static pages with a bit of PHP/CGI/SSI back then, but still zippy with a ton of traffic thanks to our obsession with file size. Highly unprofessional!
I'll be honest, while it probably didn't run the whole production system it probably did something important enough to at least get wired internet.
Semi off-topic, anyone else get annoyed when people use the word "ping" to mean "contact (me)"?<p>Sadly I've never had the chance to ask "Ah, are you ICMP compliant?" in response to a "ping me!"...