The Desk Production Server

We live in the era of the Cloud, Kubernetes clusters, and geo-redundant data centers. But sometimes, the most critical infrastructure is much closer to the ground. Literally.

This story comes from a moment of pure realization. I was at the office while a colleague was working remotely. He called me up, looking a bit sheepish, and asked for a favor: “Can you reboot the tower under my desk? There was a power cut and it didn’t come back up.”

I was confused. Why did he need his office desktop running if he was working from home?

I crawled under the desk, fought through the dust bunnies, and found the machine. Then I saw the sticky note: “Production Server - DO NOT UNPLUG.”

I froze. “This… is production?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied casually. “It feeds data to the main app. It’s been running like that for years.”

It turns out our “high-availability” architecture had a single point of failure: a standard desktop PC, resting on the floor, vulnerable to the cleaning crew’s vacuum cleaner and accidental kicks.

It’s a reminder that Shadow IT is real, and sometimes “Enterprise-grade” just means “It hasn’t crashed… yet.” 😅