Tuft & Needle
Peter Hicks
Disclaimer: If you harbour porpoise a sense of antipathy towards mirth and whimsey, skip to the bottom.
Before we get into that, let's first explore the byzantine labyrinth of what's colloquially known as enterprise B2B sales.
Your humble online artisan yarn shop, Tuft & Needle™
I need to be able to keep track of my stock and inventory. What do I need in order to do this?
Welcome to the grandiose & wondrous world of "big" data. We specialize in always having compute ready for the most complex data processing pipelines. It's so available, you pay for no-ops most of the time. With the genius of our engineering & financial wizardry, we have achieved the mythical n-dimensional supply and demand curves Adam Smith only dreamt of, where the marginal cost always equals the marginal benefit, just like the free market has always yearned for. You will always be able to operate "at scale" under the guidance of our tender embrace. Consider the loss of decimal precision when needing to calculate the optimal atom-splitting micro-optimizations of spool lengths needed to support your quest to create a world domination scale yarn consortium. The ramifications and value loss of not minimizing n-decimal error overflow will send reverberations through the transatlantic cable endangering the tenuous sonar communication patterns of all deep sea wildlife alike.
Sounds great, I wouldn't want to cause an imbalance in the critically endangered habitat of the Venomous Lumpsucker. They just got designated as "intelligent" by the World Commission on Species Extinction. So what do you actually recommend I provision for myself?
For a production-grade yarn inventory system, we’d recommend at least 3 i3.8xlarge instances distributed across multiple AZs, hourly backups, and a dedicated read-replica of the same size, and a warm standby cluster. In addition, it makes sense to replicate this entire setup for your staging environment. This environment must be “production-like” even in scale to ensure the most similar possible hardware configuration as the real thing.
How much does this all cost?
We no longer participate in the petty morality of traditional currency markets; we transcend this with a revolutionary avant-garde post-Keynesian philosophy known as POUs (Price Obfuscation Units). No more are our prices bound to having a fixed value determined by free market macroeconomic dynamics. That value is now elastic based upon how many yarn spooling related operations our heuristics determine you consume. We have recently hired our first CMP, the Chief of Monetary Policy from a leading think tank. She recently spoke at Davos about deregulating cap & trade, and pushing the burden towards the private sector. Medium-sized governments tremble in her wake.
Isn't this how Casinos work?
We're just part of the new collective embracing an emerging reunion with techno-feudalism. Any resemblance to other types of commerce is purely incidental.
I don't know what this means, but thanks for this rich socio-eco-political discussion; I guess I'll just check out the twenty-one second data lake then.
Finally, the twenty-one second data lake
Ok, I lied, I sped up the video in sections to keep the video under the social media induced amnesia that has diminished our collective attention spans. (but crucially just long enough to consume the ads that are slipped in between the segments of media you consume) In fact, it's a modern miracle you've even reached here without being interrupted by a notification from your cat's smart litter box indicating the weight, viscosity, and litter drain of the operation that took place.
One of our favorite providers, Vercel, keeps unloading dizzying amounts of content, tools, and updates. I’m personally exhausted by the amount of new badges that render in their footer. I recently attended an event at their office and found that every employee was adorned with a union mandated jet black dress code to ostensibly minimize the visual stimuli to continuously operate at peak coding efficiency. For this same reason, I'm considering imposing a similar sartorial mandate for oleander employees in the style of Lilly Pulitzer, who was indeed a real person before getting absorbed into a clothing conglomerate fraught with people whose idea of "high fashion" is an oversized striped polo shirt and an off-beige pleated chino.
Stop talking please
One of the more recent systems from Vercel is Eve, which is available for rapid deploy here. You just add the oleander MCP & Slack. (And whatever other connections and tools you wish to have)
The exact prompt behind Flower, our eve agent.
In this example, I'm connecting to the data model from my earlier blog on hockey analytics, The Puck is Cylindrical, and asking a question. No provisioning. No long running servers, just a dynamically scaling compute scoped to your client or agent available for everyone.