Why did the chicken cross the road?

A story about microservices, farm animals, couple's therapy and the joys of cooking

Lily the Hen is a master cook, she's at the forefront of her profession and regarded by most as the leading chef in the industry. Her assistant is Rusty the Rooster and together they set out to cook an answer to the ultimate question of nature...

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Lily and Rusty are a rockstar cooking team. Whenever they enter a cooking competition, they make the judges cry, get handshakes and get asked for their recipes.

Lily can cook her peers into tears and is the envy of every restaurateur in town. Rusty is like a cockerel-shaped Robin that uses the underwear on the right side of the costume.

They can certainly cook their way out of a tough situation and do miracles with the most basic ingredients. They could even take the jar of expired mayo and the two sad-looking gherkins in my fridge and produce a tasty and wonderful functional specification.

If there's something they care about, that's their craft and they're always looking for ways to make it more efficient.

One time they decided that in order to improve the quality and latency of their cooking they should...

Move in together

They reasoned that sharing an address space was the optimal way of cooking.

So they rented a small 1-bedroom studio apartment in the artsiest neighborhood in town, pooled resources, shared rent and moved in.

At first things were great, cooking at maximum speed, no interruptions, no distractions, winning contests without even trying.

But soon the natural frictions of cohabitation started to pop up.

It all started with some political disagreement around endianness, quickly followed by a stream of day-to-day impossibilities, like the padding character of choice, "who alloc'd this pile of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor and who's responsible for freeing it?" and "where the pluck did you leave my curly brace this time?".

Rusty suggested that some borrowing semantics were in order, but they discarded the idea as too hard to keep track of who owns what. They even considered paying someone to collect their garbage for them.

Most arguments were just simple things, easily ignored, but there was one thing that eventually tore them apart: their taste in music.

Lily was big into Progressive Death Metal, while Rusty, sitting firmly on the polar opposite end of the musical spectrum, was a die-hard fan of Scandinavian Power Metal.

The Great Metal Divide

These irreconcilable differences eventually lead to the only logical conclusion: they needed their own space.

And so, they both moved out into their own place, right across the street from each other.

The benefits were plain to see, they could do as they pleased all-the-time.

No asking for permission.

Clothing? Optional!

Full autonomy, and best of all, they could listen to the right kind of metal in their underwear all night*.

_{* and part of every day}

Rubbing their hands with an evil grin

But, of course, not everything was good.

For one, they were spending a lot more.

They doubled their collective rent, bills, utilities, etc.

Of course, their cloud landlords were so happy with this arrangement that they might even start promoting this kind of thing at some point.

Burnt cookies

But the worst part was that their cooking was suffering as well.

Back when they were living together, Lily would ask Rusty for some chopped onions and he would hand them over immediately.

Now the picture looked very different. Lily would put on her coat, leave the house, lock the door behind her, cross the street and ring Rusty, wait for him to appear, ask for the onions, wait in the cold for what seemed like ages until Rusty produced the onions, cross the street again, marshal through the door, take the coat off, and, finally, use the onions.

More often than not it was too late, her cooking had timed-out and she had to start all over again.

Not to mention...

The risk, oh the risk

Even though everyone assured Lily and Rusty that this was an extremely safe neighborhood, with a stable latency of single-digit milliseconds, they were very concerned.

What if they needed to cross the street in rush hour? What if there was a parade or something?

There had to be a cap to all that networking optimism.

And what is the deal with that virtual private cloud anyway?*

_{* is it a virtual cloud that is private, or is it a cloud that is virtually private?}

I just called to say I need you

Well, at least they didn't depend on each other, freedom was good right?

Truth is, Lily crossed the street a lot those days.

What they thought was a beautifully acyclic, directed relationship turned out to be a lot more complex, as relationships often are.

Rusty soon discovered that eating raw onions all the time is no fun, so he kept crossing the street to ask Lily for things.

In these strange times the bills and the failure modes kept stacking.

While metal freedom in their underwear and long nights of debauchery and deployment without giving explanations were great, their hearts were not in it.

Their cooking was suffering and that was unacceptable.

One day, their pet bats, Coupling and Cohesion, flew out the window into the freezing cold, and they decided something had to be done.

House rules

Maybe they were too hasty to move out. They fell prey to that very human condition of searching for balance by alternating exclusively between the extremes.

They needed space, freedom and abstraction boundaries, that's for sure. But boundaries doesn't necessarily mean network boundaries, right?

Maybe they could make this work after all.

They decided to give this another try and moved back in together, but this time to a two bedroom apartment.

They needed space to share and space to be alone.

They set up clear rules to live by, interfaces they'd call them, and stuck with them as if their life, or even more, their cooking depended on them.

They supported each other while staying out of each other's way.

And, of course, they each got noise cancelling headphones to headbang to their heart's content, because who the pluck would want to listen to the wrong kind of metal anyway?