essay
Infrastructure as Morality
Networks encode values in their topology; every routing table is a philosophy with latency as proof.
Infrastructure is never neutral.
Someone decides whether a packet cuts through a saturated metro core or slips along a rural ring. Someone encodes retry logic that privileges consistency over availability. Each choice is a moral stance expressed in voltage and latency. I know this viscerally—deterministic thinking kept me alive long before it built my cloud.
We live in an era where architectural literacy is traded for “DX.” Abstractions bloom, systems slow, invoices climb. It is not physics causing the drag; it is preference. The topology reveals the ethic.
Case Study: PackDraw and the SaaS Daisy Chain
To interrogate a philosophy, watch it under load. PackDraw.com is a real-time gaming platform with a simple requirement: persistent, low-latency state. Its architecture rejects that requirement at every layer.
| Component | Implementation (Inferred) | Architectural Stance |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend / API | Vercel (Next.js) | Stateless by design. Built to die. |
| Real-time | Pusher | State outsourced to a multi-hop dependency. |
| Database | Managed DBaaS | Truth lives on another network hop. |
It is a “SaaS daisy chain”: a lattice of fashionable services glued together to impersonate statefulness. The result is latency bloat and runaway cost.
The Economics of Ignorance
| Metric | PackDraw (Estimated) | First-Principles Build |
|---|---|---|
| Annual Spend | ≈ $100,000 USD | ≈ $500 USD |
| Waste Multiplier | ≈ 200× | Baseline |
A user action that should finish in 20 ms becomes a 600 ms pilgrimage across vendors. The bill is the receipt for that moral decision. This is not optimisation theatre; it is a hazard created by refusing to own state.
Experiments, Not Edicts
My answer is the work you see across this site:
- Consolidate state. Run the workload on a single, reliable piece of iron. Volant orchestrates microVMs with kernels I control.
- Own the stack. Fledge builds the initramfs artifacts; Flint manages KVM estates; the Nomad driver speaks Cloud Hypervisor natively. No rented abstractions.
- Prove the outcome. ProbablyFair’s PF-VL layer commits every random event to an append-only ledger. Determinism or it didn’t happen.
This is the mesh I call Mesh-Atlas: ASN 211747, custom routing, microVM clusters, verifiability nodes. Systems wobble, so I build attractors that keep them in the basin where they do the least harm.
Infrastructure is morality. The routing table is a manifesto. The latency is the proof. The choice is the ethic. I live on the side where determinism liberates.