Renting, and selling

Act II called it the attic, the shapeless pile of photos and exports and backups that a filing cabinet cannot hold and a company cannot throw away, the pile that has been growing since week six with nowhere of its own to live. It lives here. The attic’s proper name is object storageConcept · lights on your mapobject storageA managed service storing data as named objects in buckets, photos, videos, backups, logs, fetched by key through an API. Highly scalable and durable. Files on the shelf; structured records in the database.: a bottomless shelf of named objects, fetched by key, no folders-in-folders pretence, no ceiling anyone has ever found. The eleven thousand test photos live there now. Sunday’s flood of race photos will join them, and the shelf will not notice. Structured records in the database, shapeless things on the shelf: Act II’s cabinet-and-attic split, now with both halves named.

The three-letter ladder

The whole rental market compresses into three acronyms, rungs on one ladder of who-does-what. IaaSConcept · lights on your mapIaaSInfrastructure as a Service: renting the foundational resources, machines, storage, networking. The lowest rung, with the most control and the most operational work. is renting the foundations, instances and storage and wiring, and doing the rest yourself. PaaSConcept · lights on your mapPaaSPlatform as a Service: the provider runs your application on a managed platform, so you supply code rather than servers. The middle rung; serverless sits near it. is handing the provider your code and letting them run the platform under it. And SaaSConcept · lights on your mapSaaSSoftware as a Service: a finished product you log into, like Gmail or Slack. The top rung: least work, least control, no code of yours at all. is the finished product. Log in and use it. No code of yours anywhere.

The reason the ladder is worth a whole scene is that Traversal stands on it twice, facing both directions. To the race organisations who log into the organizer portal, Traversal IS SaaS: a finished product, subscription priced, no servers of theirs involved. And to build that product, Traversal buys IaaS by the hour from the buildings of Friday morning. Seller at the top of the ladder, buyer at the bottom, one company. Most of the modern software economy is exactly this sandwich, and being able to say which layer a company sells and which it buys is genuine fluency at a dinner party.

One question left from the tour: how does Traversal’s own code travel from Finn’s laptop to thirty identical rented machines without anyone installing anything thirty times? In a box. A very particular kind of box.