🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2025-11-29

For want of a nail the HVAC was lost

November 29, 2025

While Thanksgiving leftovers digested and the consumer mosh pit of Black Friday rolled into motion, the futures financial system scrambled and needed some #HugOps. Indeed, the narrative of decentralized, resilient, redundant cloud infrastructure isn’t defacto and is not ubiquitous (yet).

CME Group operates the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange and is on track to be a massive Google Cloud customer over the next several years. But due to the current CME Group architecture used to deliver those services, a “cooling systems issue” meant the operation halted.

In 2025, a single physical point of failure to a cooling system can freeze global futures markets for hours. Even in our timeline of increasing compute density and strained power grids, thermal management is still a critical uptime vulnerability and we are only as robust as our HVAC design.

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