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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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.
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.
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.