'Twas the rev before Christmas, when all through the aisle,
Not a cable was stirring, not even a dial.
The servers were mounted in the cabinets with care,
In hopes that St. Linus soon would be there.

The geeks were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of disk arrays danced in their heads.
The elephant in her 'kerchief, the penguin in its nest,
Had just settled their caches for a long offline REST.

When out at the gate there arose such a clatter,
Security sprang from its shell to see what was the matter.
Away to the window it flew just like Flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The LAMP on the crest of the new-painted logo,
Gave the latency of fiber to every bean, every POJO.
When, what to HAL's wondering eye should appear,
But a miniature wrapper, and eight tiny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so embedded and thin,
HAL knew in a moment it must be the Finn.
More rapid than electrons his hackers they flew,
And he troffed and shouted, all their names he sure GNU.

"Now Apache! Now Debian! Now Hadoop and Guru!
On, Ritchie! On, Kemeny! On, Kurtz and Grace, too!
To the top of the RAID! To the top of the stack!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash clear to the rack!"

As legacy code that before new paradigms fly,
When it meets with failover and links to the sky.
So up to the routers the hackers they flew,
With a payload full of virtual AWS EC2.

And then, in a nano, HAL heard on the 'site,
The prancing and pawing of each little byte.
As he drew in his sensors, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Linus came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from glasses to boots,
And his clothes were all tarnished with Jolt Cola and roots.
A bundle of source code he'd flung on his chip,
And he looked like a cracker, toggling a DIP.

His eyes how they networked! His dimples how non-trivial!
His cheeks were like mouse pads, his nose so convivial!
His tiffed little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the script on his chin was as clean as the snow.

The stump of a thumb drive he held tight in his teeth,
And its tokens encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a synced face, a small tum like a Guava,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of Java!

He was nerdy and sure, a right jolly young gnome,
And I awked when I saw him, in spite of the DOM!
A scan of his eye, a debug of his head,
Soon gave me to grok I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a pixel, but went straight to his coding,
And filled all the sessions, then turned with foreboding.
And laying his digit aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the stovepipe he rose!

He sprang to his wrapper, to his team gave a kernel,
And away they all flew, persistent and vernal.
But I heard him grep, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
"Open Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"

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