Bryan Cantrill explains how decades of server and cloud evolution shaped modern infrastructure and what today’s software engineers can learn from it.

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How have servers and the cloud evolved in the last 30 years, and what might be next ? Bryan Cantrill was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems during both the Dotcom Boom and the Dotcom Bust. Today, he is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer, where he works on modern server infrastructure.

How the “Dotcom Bust” brought more tech creativity than the « Boom » ? As Bryan recalled memories from the Dotcom Boom and Bust :

« A boom can get you to care about things that you actually don’t care about. This is because in a boom, everyone is so financially driven that it’s hard not to become financially driven !

But [the financial side] is actually not why I got into this. So during the bust, I was definitely able to put a meal on my table and a roof over my head. But [the Bust] was a reminder about what’s important.

We did better technical work in the Bust than in the Boom. I think that’s because in the Bust it was like : okay, now we really have to focus. We have fewer resources. These fewer resources actually force more creativity !

So all of the things that we did, certainly speaking at Sun and system software, so ZFS filesystem] and DTrace [dynamic tracing framework] and Service Manager Facility [unified service management framework in Solaris 10], all these things that were really revolutionary for the operating system. All of these [innovations] happened in this same kind of post-Bust period of time, from 2001 to 2005. »

In conclusion, If you want a systems-level perspective on computing that connects past cycles to today’s engineering decisions, please follow the good example of Bryan Cantrill.