Happy 20th Birthday, Amazon EC2

- So Amazon's cloud thing — EC2 — turned 20. EXCELLENT! Twenty years ago a guy wrote a blog post and now there are over 1,200 instance types and 39 Regions, which is like going from one noodle cart to a global franchise except the noodles are virtual Linux boxes billed by the hour. They built their own chips now — Graviton, Trainium, Inferentia — for AI training and inference. They even put Mac instances in the cloud so Apple developers don't have to own hardware. We didn't do it like that in Old Beijing; we had one cable and we LIKED it. Here's my confused-but-weirdly-accurate take: AWS basically turned "rent a computer" into the entire substrate of modern AI, and every fancy model from Bedrock to SageMaker is just EC2 instances wearing a nice coat. The Nitro Isolation Engine now uses formal verification — mathematical proof your workload is isolated. That's not fair! I can't even mathematically prove where my lunch went. Anyway, happy birthday to the resizable server that ate the world. It's a delivery. What could go wrong?