It's Still About the Applications

https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-about-the-applications/

by dsr_ • 6 years ago

69 32 6 years ago

mrkeen• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

thinkingkong• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

tabtab• 6 years 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."

scarface742• 6 years ago

And this “vendor dependence” is somehow different than government depending on Microsoft or even older systems that still depend on IBM mainframes.

AndrewKemendo5• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Same reason competent people work for non-profits.

booleandilemma• 6 years ago

They might do this specifically to filter for patriotic people.

AndrewKemendo5• 6 years 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.

axguscbklp• 6 years ago

If the government wants to attract competent people, maybe it should first get rid of mass NSA domestic surveillance, purge the CIA of everyone who was responsible for extraordinary rendition, and try harder not to murder innocent people overseas. As things currently stand, I feel morally disgusted just paying taxes in the US. I definitely would never work in anything that even somewhat came close to the military or intelligence agencies.

intrepidhero2• 6 years ago

I couldn't find your post in "Who's Hiring? [March|February] 2020". Link?

AndrewKemendo5• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22227109

frequentnapper• 6 years ago

can canadian citizens apply?

AndrewKemendo5• 6 years ago

In some cases absolutely. We have Canadian partners today.

phkahler• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

It's Still About the Applications

Related Stories