Sunday, October 17, 2021

Technical Debt isn't Free

While many computing systems mirror systems in nature, one aspect that doesn’t is technical debt. The majority of spending is maintaining the existing systems, and yet very little attention is paid to how to reduce the on-going costs. 

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IN NATURE, THE FALL BEGINS THE PROCESS OF RESETTING

In many parts of the world, Fall (or Autumn) gives us a last glimpse of the beauty of nature, but then it resets for another cycle of recuperation and regeneration. This is one of the aspects of nature that the tech industry doesn’t seem to emulate in their systems. 

WE ACCEPT RESETS AND CHANGES ALL AROUND US, EXCEPT IN IT

  1. Why don’t we create “life cycles” on commonly deployed systems? 
  2. Why don’t we prepare people for resets and “leap forwards” better?
  3. Why isn’t there a part of our industry that attempts to innovate in this space, rather than just shift it to another party as “someone else’s problem”?
  4. Why do we assume the same needs (support, uptime, etc.) of the technical debt as we do the new things we build to replace it?


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Wednesday, October 13, 2021

A New Distributed Cloud Architecture

Jonathan Seelig (@j_seelig, Co-Founder/CEO of Ridge) talks about building the distributed cloud, remotely managing cloud resources, and the evolution of the edge. 

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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start by talking a little bit about your background, and what led you to trying to create a new vision of “the cloud”. 

Topic 2 - What types of problems exist with the current (mostly centralized) cloud architectures today? Or where are there new opportunities to rethink and introduce a new architecture?

Topic 3 - Let’s talk about the main concepts behind the Ridge architecture. How much does it borrow from your experience at Akamai, and how much of it is your team looking at the world differently?

Topic 4 - What are the core primitives of Ridge? How do companies engage with it? 

Topic 5 - What are some of the near-term and long-term impacts that you expect companies would see in using the Ridge architecture vs. more centralized cloud architectures? 

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Sunday, October 10, 2021

Innovator's Dilemma - Part 2

Part 2 (of 2) looking at a recent example of how The Innovator’s Dilemma is playing out between the biggest clouds and the challenging upstarts.  

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MAKING A MAJOR CHANGE IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT

Understanding the transition to cloud means understanding that almost everything about your technology stack and business stack will likely have to change, get re-invented, or built from scratch.

A BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS OR FAILURE THROUGH THE TRANSITION

  1. To build or to buy? Do you understand the scope of the problem, the velocity of change this creates,and how well you can actually execute?  
  2. How do you acquire, and how do you manage internal conflict?
  3. What will the new technology stack look like? Are you using the same design principles? Are you using the same architects?  
  4. How does this impact your business? What backstops (“cash cows”) does your business have to prop up the new business? 

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Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Evolutions in Security Monitoring

Huxlee Barbee (@huxley_barbee, Head Security Prod Mktg @DataDogHQ) talks about the challenging odds of preventing security attacks, managing configuration mistakes, scaling security through monitoring, and security feedback loops in production.  

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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let’s start by talking a little bit about your background, and where you focus your attention these days.

Topic 2 -According to many reports, configuration mistakes tend to lead to the most security breaches. Who is typically making the mistakes? 

Topic 3 - Can you dig deeper on the dynamics between security on the one hand and developers and SRE engineers on the other hand?

Topic 4 - So what are some of the strategies and tactics for achieving optimum balance between these opposing interests?

Topic 5 - Should we think about platform (infra) security apart from workload (application) security?

Topic 6 - Can you talk to us about the differences between applying security to things that happen pre-production (e.g. CI/CD, software-supply chains) and things that happen in production?


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Sunday, October 3, 2021

Innovator's Dilemma - Part 1

Part 1 (of 2) looking at a recent example of how The Innovator’s Dilemma is playing out between the biggest clouds and the challenging upstarts.  

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ONE COMPANY’S PROFIT IS ANOTHER COMPANY’S OPPORTUNITY

As AWS transitions from long-time leaders to a new leadership team, many industry upstarts are looking for ways to pick away at their most profitable (and customer-problematic) services, with new capabilities that may unlock completely new business models for companies.

CHEAPER NETWORKING, AGILE COMPUTING, and NEW COMPANY MODELS

  1. Disruption rarely happens because of better technology, but more often because of changing economics. (Gracely’s Theorem) 
  2. AWS has long had very expensive networking costs, but it’s an area that really hasn’t faced competition. 
  3. AWS offered enough services that their customers made the choice to deal with the network costs vs. having to build things themselves.
  4. Being the “everything” thing in computing always has its pros and cons. Computing has historically (last 40yrs) been moving to more distributed, modular architectures.
  5. We’ve seen a number of companies begin to offer edge or serverless types of offerings (GitHub, Netlify, Google Run, various CDN offerings, 
  6. New ideas always emerge from difficult times (e.g. COVID pandemic) that we didn’t expect.
  7. Will this create a new round of acquisitions? Will it trigger price wars? 


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Wednesday, September 29, 2021

The State of Cloud Security

Josh Stella (@joshstella, Founder/CEO of @FugueHQ) talks about the differences between cloud security and data center security, the value businesses place on security implementations, and enabling governance in the cloud.

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Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. It’s been a complicated world for security the last 12-18 months. Tell us a little bit about your background and the State of Cloud Security 2021 report.

Topic 2 - Between the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft database hack and daily breaches of 100M users, where are we with security these days? It seems as messy as ever, and yet it also seems like people aren’t that concerned anymore. 

Topic 3 - Misconfiguration still seems to be a major issue. Isn’t Automation and Infra-as-Code and GitOps catching on? Policy-as-Code.

Topic 4 - We now have DevSecOps, which combines all these functions together. Who is ultimately responsible for Security?

Topic 5 - When companies move to the public cloud, they still have regulatory requirements. The cloud providers have “certifications” (e.g. SOC 2, NIST 800-53, GDPR, and HIPAA, so are they responsible now?

Topic 6 - How do we start matching the level of motivation the bad guys (hackers) have with the level of concern companies should have?

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Sunday, September 26, 2021

Developing New Habits in COVID

COVID has changed the world over the past two years. But how many of the technology changes we’ve made will remain, and which ones may revert back to pre-COVID standards? 

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CLOUD GROWTH THROUGH GLOBAL PANDEMIC

This week I had a discussion about the amount of change that happened over the past 18-24 months and whether or not that's normal (across industries)?

WHAT STAYS, WHAT CHANGES, and WHY?

  1. Not every company or industry reacted the same. 
  2. Companies established new norms around remote work. This will impact future hiring.
  3. Companies adopted more remote-friendly technologies.
  4. Many customers began using more public cloud services (out of necessity) and it worked fine. They likely won’t abandon these technology choices.
  5. Companies are focused on how to adjust to these new normals, so they’ll prioritize things that work (in the short-term) 
  6. Will this be a boom for people getting new cloud certifications?
  7. Will companies eventually do cost-cutting on cloud spending, since it was “just do it!” last year?
  8. Will this create the new “bi-modal” IT? 

 

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