Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

Carbon Neutral: thoughts on energy

For at least a couple of days, climate change has been back on the agenda with the protests happening in London by Extinction Rebellion. The coverage has fallen into the usual “adversarial” pattern: weighing the protestors’ points against the need for people to travel, or asking whether it is hypocritical that some protestors arrived by car / train / plane. Fundamentally, the point has been somewhat lost, but it makes me think anyway.

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Encryption-at-rest under question: SSDs, hardware support and Bitlocker

Many of us deal with personal and sensitive data these days. Best practice in computing circles is to make use of “encryption at rest”: ensuring data remains secure by encrypting it on a device (whether it’s a laptop, mobile phone or USB key). Some researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands have discovered that widely used data storage devices with self-encrypting drives don’t do the job very well. Worse, they weaken the security of the popular Bitlocker solution.

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Responses to “Software architecture is failing”

It has been just over a week since I wrote that software architecture is failing, which received a level of response I didn’t expect. The reason I wrote the post in the first place was to set the scene for some future posts I want to write: as I said, I don’t think we talk enough about architecture for SMEs particularly, and I want to spend some time focussing on those. This post described the reason why.

However, one thing was very clear: the post overall, and many of the ideas within it, strongly resonate with a much larger group of people than I expected. I want to reflect on that a little, but first, let’s look at some stats.

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A defining time in deployment: thoughts on Istio

Last week I gave a lightning talk, ostensibly on Kubernetes / docker / prometheus, to a motley crew of London CTOs. I rarely give talks these days, so of course I ran over massively. There’s so much I’ve learned, and my teams have learned, attempting to force a discussion like this into a lightning format feels trite (in retrospect).

There’s a key reason for this. In my talk, I called it the “Cambrian explosion period of Ops”: there are a multitude of tools available, more are being developed all the time, and there’s a huge amount of overlap.

I don’t want to try to predict when we’re going to hit “peak Ops tools”. Serverless is a way off from hitting most mainstream teams yet; it’s still a novelty right now, will grow very quickly around 2020 and will probably be dominant by 2025. So, we can’t be that far off the peak – and another sign of this is that we’re beginning to see real consolidation.

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Stackanetes

There’s a great demo from the recent OpenStack Summit (wish I had been there): OpenStack is a known massive pain to get up and running, and having it in a reasonable set of containers that might be used to deploy it by default is really interesting to see. This is available in Quay as Stackanetes, which is a pretty awful name (as is Stackenetes, and Stackernetes, both of which were googlewhacks earlier today) for some great work.

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Tech2020 followup

The various videos of the speakers from Tech2020 – including yours truly – are up and availablefor Skillsmatter members. Going back to my previous blog post, I can heartily recommend the speakers who I was excited about, but have to say, I was blown away by the overall quality of the conference. Even those topics I didn’t think would hold much interest or news for me turned out to be incredibly interesting, and I daresay the next editing of this conference will be something to watch out for.

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“Dart” out in the open – what’s it all about?

This morning was the big “Dart language” unveil – the Dart websites are up at http://dartlang.org and http://dart.googlecode.com. And already many seasoned Javascripters have the knives out. I’m surprised for a couple of reasons: the first, this isn’t quite as big a deal as many people thought it would be (me included), both in terms of the scope of the system and the distance to Javascript. Second, the system isn’t quite as finished as many predicted: this isn’t going to be usable for a little while.

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Derren ‘witch’ Brown

Apologies, but I couldn’t help but comment on this. I don’t believe it’s broadcast delay. There is a delay there, but it’s of the order of seconds. His waffle at the end is about the same length. I don’t see what difference it would make – it could make the switch happen earlier (e.g., at 1:40 on the video above) but I don’t see any gain. With people analysing the video, it doesn’t really matter where it happens.

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Stuff-as-a-service…

I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space – in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really. Andy’s take on this is really worth interesting, although I personally think he’s defending Bitfolk’s pricing unnecessarily. My basic philosophy on this is that price isn’t an issue; things cost what they cost. What is really at stake is the value of the service: is what I’m paying for worth it?

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