the enigma machine
It took about 2,000 Digital Ocean droplets, 13 minutes of compute time, and about $7 dollars worth of cloud resources, to break the Enigma code which were used by the Nazis in World War 2. The code was written in Python and ran as minions. The minions did the 99% of the grunt work. The droplets ran 41 million password combinations per second. What took years for Allied forces to break the code can now be decoded in just 13 minutes. Read the article.