By the final morning at the summer house, I knew it was time to shut the cluster down. The batteries had been pushed to their limit, the Starlink dish had weathered its share of salty breezes, and my experiment of edge computing by the Atlantic was complete.

There’s a ritual to shutting down machines in a place like this.
- One by one, I stopped the services, watching services drain and disks sync their final writes.
- The cluster nodes went quiet, their status LEDs fading into stillness.
- Even Starlink’s dish, which had been faithfully tilting and tracking satellites above, folded back into rest.

The deck felt different once the hum was gone — only the steady sound of waves remained.

What I carried back with me wasn’t just a stack of hardware. It was a new way of thinking about limits as design. Running a cluster on batteries with satellite internet teaches you that:
- Every watt matters.
- Every packet has a cost.
- Every service needs to justify its existence.

These aren’t constraints to be resented; they’re reminders of what makes computing resilient. In a datacenter, it’s easy to forget these truths behind redundant power feeds and multi-gigabit fiber. Out here, the edge forces you to respect them.

I packed the servers into their case, coiled the cables, and set the batteries aside for recharge. Looking back at the ocean one last time, I thought about how odd — and yet how fitting — it was to run distributed systems in a place defined by vast distances and shifting currents.

The Atlantic doesn’t apologize for its unpredictability, and neither does Starlink. The edge isn’t neat or predictable — but maybe that’s what makes it worth exploring.

Series Wrap-Up

Survival Computing isn’t just about pushing hardware to its limits. It’s about running clusters in places where the datacenter disappears — where power, bandwidth, and stability are scarce, and every choice matters.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. Next time, maybe with better batteries, tuned workloads, and a little less ambition. Because in the end, the real success wasn’t flawless uptime — it was running code at the edge of the world, with the sea as my datacenter walls.