We were almost to Indiana.
A friend had sent six photos from the road under the subject “NYC bound.” I replied from my phone with a tiny progress report and three exclamation points.
The U-Haul, the apartment, and the job were all moving at the same time.
Before we reached New York, Peek was already asking me to think about a data center. The company needed somewhere to put equipment, routers to connect a mobile carrier back to services running in Amazon Web Services, and a useful estimate of what the first build would cost.
I was not officially working yet.
The next night, after the drive finally ended, I answered anyway. Our belongings had arrived safely and we were moving into the apartment the next day. Then I switched directly into the network question.
The cost would depend on security and bandwidth. I asked for the carrier material and said I would put together some thoughts.
That email is the most accurate picture of the move I have found. The first paragraph says the boxes made it. The second asks for network requirements.
Peek's application was already running in Amazon, but the mobile product had other paths to manage. The dedicated email device had to reach outside providers and carrier networks, and the company was starting to think about where its own equipment belonged. A small data center footprint could handle routing, firewalls, virtualization, and connections back to the cloud.
I had spent years doing that work at Beatport. I knew how to start with a half cabinet and how quickly a startup could outgrow it. I also knew the estimate was useless without the traffic and security details.
The route across the country ended in New York. The routing work started before we unpacked.