As a young kid in Science class I remember learning about simple machines – levers, ramps, etc. The one thing I had trouble understanding was how increasing distance decreased work. It seemed counter-intuitive to me, since the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. One of my teachers pointed something out to me that made the light bulb in my head turn on: “Have you ever noticed how it is easier to walk up a ramp in a zig-zag path rather than a straight line?” I was in 3rd grade so of course every ramp I came across was an opportunity for me to run zig-zag up or down. The point was clear - if a straight line is too much work, take some extra steps if you must.
Ages ago I had the privilege of building out the first field engineering team for VMware’s Cloud Service Providers. Back then it was an easy message for users to understand – we could take your existing workloads and give you improved resilience and operational costs, while providing the flexibility to deliver enterprise applications in a familiar way.
