6 ms·

It's Still About the Applications

69 points by dsr_ 7y ago

mrkeen 7y ago
This is all rings so true. Why do I have to swipe an access card and display a name badge in my building, when all the important data is outside the building? Why do we factor GDPR into our designs if we don't know where we store the data, and we'll never meet (nor be able to trust) the people who hold onto it for us. Can't we just encrypt it on our side then? I don't think we're getting homomorphically-encrypted relational databases anytime soon. My last month has been an effort of 'migrating' a service from another team to ours. The service stayed right where it was - the cloud - but we sank weeks into editing IAM files and deploy scrips to try to make it 'belong' to our team. We're programmers; we don't know about AWS's policies model, security groups or software-defined networking. Whenever I'm forced to interact with AWS I always feel like I'm doing significantly more work than the "managed" selling point of AWS would imply. I know my way around ssh, docker, iptables etc. But I miss having someone in the team whose actual job it is to be good at these things.
- gliese1337 7y ago
  Why do I have to swipe an access card and display a name badge in my building, when all the important data is outside the building? So that angry customers can't walk in the front door, take the elevator up to the fifth floor, and hang out in the CEO's office.
- deleted 7y ago
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thinkingkong 7y ago
Honestly this entire system is a mess. But it's working so nobody is going to change it, plus going "over the top" and building a better, more idealistic solution will have the same set of problems. Assuming you end up building something dramatically better or easier, getting market share means addressing more and more use cases, and you more or less end up as the n+1th protocol or standard. To me the only long term in dealing with this mess is going to be some shift in how we actually do computing on data. Leave the data at rest / in-situ and move more and more compute capacity to where it sits, then merge results together later. We're getting to the point where containers are common place, and FaaS is becoming comfortable.
lastres0rt 7y ago
I guess this article counts as therapy, what with the whole line of "The goddamn vaunted databases of the government are NOT the stuff of conspiracy theories. In fact, they're just as shitty as you would expect."
mrwnmonm 7y ago
Non-native English speaker here. Could someone write an easier summary, please?
- tabtab 7y ago
  Sure: "The cloud doesn't solve common IT problems, only shifts them around, and makes some problems worse, such as more vendor-dependency. If you hire amateurs, you get amateurish results. Renting cloud-based amateurs has all the same problems as in-house (internal) amateurs."
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And this “vendor dependence” is somehow different than government depending on Microsoft or even older systems that still depend on IBM mainframes.
    - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
      You're going a step further in the case of cloud though. Before you'd at least hire the sysadmins. Now you rely on probably dirt cheap offshore consulting. It's just more outsourcing. It comes with scale and as cancer it is just a reality. Eventually it will have to be burned down.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        They won’t admit it, but many companies move to the cloud not only because they don’t want to deal with administering servers but also because they don’t want to deal with server administrators. It’s not like on prem server administrators have a great track record when it comes to security.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
As one of the "Federal IT managers" actually doing this, there are too many broad statements here that the overall message ends up being misleading. If you were completely cynical, then you could find enough examples to make anything in here seem true. For example, this entire paragraph is wrong: Here’s something that will surprise you a lot: when it comes to government, cloud computing represents a huge shift of money from the public sector to the private sector. It’s the privatization of of government data. Lock-in is completely ignored: how will government departments ever get their data back out of the cloud? “Not my problem,” says the federal IT manager, “besides, there’s nothing about lock-in in these Powerpoint slides.” There is realistically too much here to unpack in a comment, but I would say that the overall thesis of the article is pointing in the right direction. However it's not like failure is a forgone conclusion, if competent people (like a lot of you reading this are) join the government to actually help fix these things then we can actually do things correctly. I posted in the Who's Hiring Thread last month so we're ready whenever you are.
- irrational 7y ago
  I've never actually looked into government tech jobs, but my assumption is that they would pay much less than a competent person could make in the private sector. Other than pay or patriotism, what would motivate a competent person to want to work for the government?
  - simplify 7y ago
    Same reason competent people work for non-profits.
  - booleandilemma 7y ago
    They might do this specifically to filter for patriotic people.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    Patriotism is the wrong word. If you think that your government should be doing things a different way, and you feel you know how to do it better then you have a couple of avenues to participate. One of them is joining the government in a capacity that allows you to affect change directly. It's true, you aren't going to get paid $500,000 a year for being a software engineer. However, the USG does not pay subsistence wages. For entry level Data Science jobs in Boston we pay better than the market, and with better benefits, a union, matching investment accounts, low cost health insurance, stability and many other things you don't have elsewhere. We also have opportunities to work on things that you just can't elsewhere.
phkahler 7y ago
The best part is the elasticity of cloud storage. When the projects fail, they'll just keep all the data in the failed project achive. The next go will have it's own multiple copies of the same data and so on. They'll just keep paying incremental storage charges. Meanwhile, behind the scenes in the cloud - automatic, transparent deduplication....
reggieband 7y ago
> the very fact that The Pentagon thinks that all its cloud apps are going to work under either AWS or Azure shows how ignorant they are I'm not sure why that is the case. I worked at a place that mandated minimum two cloud support and we were going down that road when I left. I didn't see any complete show-stoppers from a technical perspective although there were a few annoying issues. Maybe the author is just hammering home the incompetence angle, where the IT managers he lampoons are incapable of managing such a project. But at it's face, holding an expectation that systems be redundant across cloud providers seems reasonable.
- musingsole 7y ago
  I didn't read it as cloud applications should be interoperable between providers but that a given application should be able to pick which platform they build on. I've had a similar argument with a previous employer who wanted to select just one provider. I was baffled at the time as provisioning an account on any of them takes seconds. So there's no reason to pick one other than politi---and right about then is when I understood the whole motivation.
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69 points by dsr_ 7y ago

This is all rings so true. Why do I have to swipe an access card and display a name badge in my building, when all the important data is outside the building? Why do we factor GDPR into our designs if we don't know where we store the data, and we'll never meet (nor be able to trust) the people who hold onto it for us. Can't we just encrypt it on our side then? I don't think we're getting homomorphically-encrypted relational databases anytime soon. My last month has been an effort of 'migrating' a service from another team to ours. The service stayed right where it was - the cloud - but we sank weeks into editing IAM files and deploy scrips to try to make it 'belong' to our team. We're programmers; we don't know about AWS's policies model, security groups or software-defined networking. Whenever I'm forced to interact with AWS I always feel like I'm doing significantly more work than the "managed" selling point of AWS would imply. I know my way around ssh, docker, iptables etc. But I miss having someone in the team whose actual job it is to be good at these things.

gliese1337 7y ago
Why do I have to swipe an access card and display a name badge in my building, when all the important data is outside the building? So that angry customers can't walk in the front door, take the elevator up to the fifth floor, and hang out in the CEO's office.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

thinkingkong 7y ago

Honestly this entire system is a mess. But it's working so nobody is going to change it, plus going "over the top" and building a better, more idealistic solution will have the same set of problems. Assuming you end up building something dramatically better or easier, getting market share means addressing more and more use cases, and you more or less end up as the n+1th protocol or standard. To me the only long term in dealing with this mess is going to be some shift in how we actually do computing on data. Leave the data at rest / in-situ and move more and more compute capacity to where it sits, then merge results together later. We're getting to the point where containers are common place, and FaaS is becoming comfortable.

lastres0rt 7y ago

I guess this article counts as therapy, what with the whole line of "The goddamn vaunted databases of the government are NOT the stuff of conspiracy theories. In fact, they're just as shitty as you would expect."

mrwnmonm 7y ago

Non-native English speaker here. Could someone write an easier summary, please?

tabtab 7y ago
Sure: "The cloud doesn't solve common IT problems, only shifts them around, and makes some problems worse, such as more vendor-dependency. If you hire amateurs, you get amateurish results. Renting cloud-based amateurs has all the same problems as in-house (internal) amateurs."
- scarface74 7y ago
  And this “vendor dependence” is somehow different than government depending on Microsoft or even older systems that still depend on IBM mainframes.
  - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
    You're going a step further in the case of cloud though. Before you'd at least hire the sysadmins. Now you rely on probably dirt cheap offshore consulting. It's just more outsourcing. It comes with scale and as cancer it is just a reality. Eventually it will have to be burned down.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      They won’t admit it, but many companies move to the cloud not only because they don’t want to deal with administering servers but also because they don’t want to deal with server administrators. It’s not like on prem server administrators have a great track record when it comes to security.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

As one of the "Federal IT managers" actually doing this, there are too many broad statements here that the overall message ends up being misleading. If you were completely cynical, then you could find enough examples to make anything in here seem true. For example, this entire paragraph is wrong: Here’s something that will surprise you a lot: when it comes to government, cloud computing represents a huge shift of money from the public sector to the private sector. It’s the privatization of of government data. Lock-in is completely ignored: how will government departments ever get their data back out of the cloud? “Not my problem,” says the federal IT manager, “besides, there’s nothing about lock-in in these Powerpoint slides.” There is realistically too much here to unpack in a comment, but I would say that the overall thesis of the article is pointing in the right direction. However it's not like failure is a forgone conclusion, if competent people (like a lot of you reading this are) join the government to actually help fix these things then we can actually do things correctly. I posted in the Who's Hiring Thread last month so we're ready whenever you are.

irrational 7y ago
I've never actually looked into government tech jobs, but my assumption is that they would pay much less than a competent person could make in the private sector. Other than pay or patriotism, what would motivate a competent person to want to work for the government?
- simplify 7y ago
  Same reason competent people work for non-profits.
- booleandilemma 7y ago
  They might do this specifically to filter for patriotic people.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  Patriotism is the wrong word. If you think that your government should be doing things a different way, and you feel you know how to do it better then you have a couple of avenues to participate. One of them is joining the government in a capacity that allows you to affect change directly. It's true, you aren't going to get paid $500,000 a year for being a software engineer. However, the USG does not pay subsistence wages. For entry level Data Science jobs in Boston we pay better than the market, and with better benefits, a union, matching investment accounts, low cost health insurance, stability and many other things you don't have elsewhere. We also have opportunities to work on things that you just can't elsewhere.

phkahler 7y ago

The best part is the elasticity of cloud storage. When the projects fail, they'll just keep all the data in the failed project achive. The next go will have it's own multiple copies of the same data and so on. They'll just keep paying incremental storage charges. Meanwhile, behind the scenes in the cloud - automatic, transparent deduplication....

reggieband 7y ago

> the very fact that The Pentagon thinks that all its cloud apps are going to work under either AWS or Azure shows how ignorant they are I'm not sure why that is the case. I worked at a place that mandated minimum two cloud support and we were going down that road when I left. I didn't see any complete show-stoppers from a technical perspective although there were a few annoying issues. Maybe the author is just hammering home the incompetence angle, where the IT managers he lampoons are incapable of managing such a project. But at it's face, holding an expectation that systems be redundant across cloud providers seems reasonable.

musingsole 7y ago
I didn't read it as cloud applications should be interoperable between providers but that a given application should be able to pick which platform they build on. I've had a similar argument with a previous employer who wanted to select just one provider. I was baffled at the time as provisioning an account on any of them takes seconds. So there's no reason to pick one other than politi---and right about then is when I understood the whole motivation.

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