Latest from LILY

Set and forget

Every leap in computing has handed people back a piece of their time by taking one job off their hands. Keeping your application alive after it is written, is the next one to go.

Billed Before the First Request

A cluster is the smallest thing that can have a control plane. A load balancer is the smallest thing that can terminate a connection. An address is the smallest thing that can be routed to. A volume is the smallest thing that can hold a filesystem. None of them divides. You cannot buy a tenth of a control plane, so the smallest project buys a whole one, and the bill shows.

What Neocloud actually means

Ask what a neocloud is and you get a description of an inventory. Racks of accelerators, sold by the hour or by the month, to companies training or serving models. The demand is real, the businesses are real, and the buildings going up to serve them are among the most technically demanding structures in commercial construction at the moment. None of that earns them the title “Neo”.

The Divisibility Problem: The Grid & The Second Industrial Age of Computation

The basic resources modern economies run on eventually go from being a product to becoming a utility: bespoke, then standardized and traded, then drawn from a network and made ubiquitous. The crossing from the second stage to the third is decided by one property: divisibility. Compute took the first step toward stage three in 2006, and has still not arrived.

It’s a Mätch!

The server is the cheap part

The server is the cheap part. What self-hosted Kubernetes actually costs: staffing ratios, measured utilization, and the maintenance bill nobody prices.

European infrastructure is having a moment

Europe has no shortage of cloud providers. What it does not have is one an engineer would choose on merit, with the jurisdiction as a bonus rather than the justification.

The Lily Manifesto

Computing took a wrong turn. The world doesn't need more cloud products — it needs infrastructure that disappears. You build. We carry.