My son's Minecraft server has been running in our data center for 18 months.
I built it for his birthday because my home internet was too slow.
The company had an unused server with 256GB of RAM.
He had six friends.
This seemed efficient.
Last month our infrastructure team noticed one machine generating constant outbound traffic to residential IPs after 4 PM.
Security asked what application lived on it.
I said it was a Java-based distributed collaboration environment.
They asked who owned it.
I said a small external user group.
Nobody asked the next question.
Instead, engineering requested access because they thought I had built an internal sandbox platform.
I gave them a separate instance.
Now 32 developers use it for testing.
The CTO approved two new servers for “non-production experimentation.”
My son just got upgraded to 512GB of RAM.
Happy early birthday.