The database servers powering Let's Encrypt
I was, long ago, an old-school Unix sysadmin.  While I was technically aware of how powerful smallish servers have become, this article really crystallized that for me.64 cores and 24 NVME drives in a 2U spot on a rack is just insane compared to what we used to have to do to get a beefy database server.  And it's not some exotic thing, just a popular mainstream Dell SKU.If you price it out on Dell's site, you get a retail price north of $200k.  That is really what made it clear for me.  That you could fit $200k+ worth of DIMMS, Drives, CPUS into a 2U spot :)