Jonathan Leblang

“But she was barely listening. “There’s this newish thing from Amazon? Called an AMI—an Amazon Machine Image. Basically it runs a snapshot of an operating system. There are hundreds of them, loaded up and ready to run.” Evan said, “Um.” “Virtual machines,” she explained, with a not-insubstantial trace of irritation. “Okay.” “But the good thing with virtual machines? You hit a button and you have two of them. Or ten thousand. In data centers all over the world. Here—look—I’m replicating them now, requesting that they’re geographically dispersed with guaranteed availability.” He looked but could not keep up with the speed at which things were happening on the screen. Despite his well-above-average hacking skills, he felt like a beginning skier atop a black-diamond run. She was still talking. “We upload all the encrypted data from the laptop to the cloud first, right? Like you were explaining poorly and condescendingly to me back at the motel.” “In hindsight—” “And we spread the job out among all of them. Get Hashkiller whaling away, throwing all these password combinations at it. Then who cares if we get locked out after three wrong password attempts? We just go to the next virtual machine. And the one after that.” “How do you have the hardware to handle all that?” She finally paused, blowing a glossy curl out of her eyes. “That’s what I’m telling you, X. You don’t buy hardware anymore. You rent cycles in the cloud. And the second we’re done, we kill the virtual machines and there’s not a single trace of what we did.” She lifted her hands like a low-rent spiritual guru. “It’s all around and nowhere at the same time.” A sly grin. “Like you.”
― Gregg Hurwitz, Hellbent