I · Drizzle
Afor the curious & the patient
- 1 station of your choice
- 2 vCPU · 4 GiB · 40 GiB nimbus disk
- Shared egress, 200 GiB/mo
- Handwritten welcome card
per month, inclusive€ 9
DECLASSIFIED
FOR PUBLIC ATMOSPHERE
FOR PUBLIC ATMOSPHERE
An Almanac of Compute
№ 047 — VOL. IX
We rent & the sky by the millisecond, with citations.
Since 2019 the Nimbus Bureau has operated a small, deliberate fleet of atmospheric compute stations — eleven of them, distributed across continents and watched over by a rotating cast of weather-minded engineers. We do not sell “the cloud.” We sell a particular fog, in known volumes, with a printed receipt and a forwarding address.
A NOTE FROM
THE BUREAU
THE BUREAU
filed by H. Marquette,
station chief, FRA‑03
station chief, FRA‑03
We have, on occasion, been accused of being too small. We accept the charge.
The Bureau was founded with a quiet thesis: that compute, like weather, is best understood as a local phenomenon — measured carefully, reported honestly, and never sold by the petabyte. Each of our eleven stations is staffed, named, and addressable by post. When something fails, a person writes you a letter. When it recovers, the same person signs the closure.
What you will find in this dispatch is a complete schedule of our services as of the date stamped above. We do not maintain a marketplace. We do not auction your workloads. We bill in plain currency and publish our outages in a public log that is older than most of our competitors.
If you require ten thousand GPUs by Friday, we will, with regret, refer you elsewhere. If you require seventeen — operated honestly, on hardware whose serial numbers we know — we can have them warm by Wednesday afternoon.
III. Atlas of Operating Stations
Eleven outposts, one barometer.
Reading the chart
- OPERATING8 stations
- ADVISORY2 stations
- STORM1 station
Dashed red lines indicate prevailing failover routes for the present hour. They are recomputed every fourteen minutes and printed, by hand, on the wall of each station.
Next maintenance
TYO-02
26 V · 03:00 — 03:42 UTC
IV. Schedule of Tariffs
Three weights of weather, priced honestly.
RECOMMENDED
BY THE BUREAU
BY THE BUREAU
II · Overcast
Bfor the working practitioner
- 3 stations, automatic failover
- 8 vCPU · 32 GiB · 400 GiB disk
- Egress 2 TiB/mo, fair-use
- Telephone access to your station chief
- Monthly weather report, by post
per month, inclusive€ 84
III · Front
Cfor the operationally serious
- All 11 stations, anycast
- Reserved silicon, named & warm
- Egress 25 TiB/mo, then by note
- Quarterly visit from an engineer
- A key to the FRA-03 garden
per month, from€ 1,240
All prices in euro. Invoiced on the first; payable by transfer, cheque, or, in two known cases, by barter (honey, beeswax).
V. Field Manifest
What is running, right now.
A complete, sworn statement of services currently operating across the fleet, generated from the dispatch ledger at the time of printing. We do not redact this document.
last updated · 14:07:22 UTC
| Code | Station | Service | p50 | p99 | Load | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NB-001 | FRA-03 | compute · general | 7 ms | 22 ms | 41% | clear |
| NB-014 | LON-02 | object · cold | 11 ms | 38 ms | 63% | clear |
| NB-022 | STH-09 | queue · durable | 9 ms | 31 ms | 19% | clear |
| NB-031 | SFO-11 | compute · gpu | 18 ms | 71 ms | 77% | light fog |
| NB-040 | YYZ-02 | database · postgres | 6 ms | 19 ms | 52% | clear |
| NB-055 | GRU-01 | compute · general | — | — | 0% | storm · failover armed |
| NB-061 | JNB-01 | edge · caching | 14 ms | 44 ms | 62% | haze |
| NB-074 | TYO-02 | object · warm | 12 ms | 52 ms | 28% | overcast · maint. 03:00 |
| NB-082 | SIN-04 | compute · burst | 10 ms | 29 ms | 38% | clear |
| NB-091 | SYD-01 | compute · general | 13 ms | 41 ms | 44% | clear |
| NB-099 | DUB-04 | identity · root | 8 ms | 24 ms | 22% | clear |
“The promise of the cloud was that you would forget the machines. We never agreed to that. We know the machines. We have named the machines. Two of them have, somewhat against our wishes, become beloved.” — from the Bureau's annual report, MMXXIV
Annotation
The two beloved machines are Bertha (FRA‑03, rack 2, position 14) and Pim (STH‑09, rack 1, position 3). Bertha has, at the time of this dispatch, served 1.42×1013 requests without an unplanned restart. Pim is younger, and somewhat moodier. Both are accepting visitors on Thursdays.
— H. Marquette, station chief.
Open an account,
by post or by wire.
no card required · invoice on the first