carlosf

Here is what I'm doing:

- All work is meaningless, so I started seeking the ones that pay the most (banks, hedges, FAANGs).

- By making a lot of money early, I plan to soft retire in five years (with 35) - I will take a loooong vacation, then work as a freelancer / consultant as I please.

- Without the fear of starving or being old without cash, I will pursue stuff I like.

PM me in five years and I will tell you whether I succeeded.

I use Nomad a lot in my company and I really like it.

Our team tried to migrate to AWS ECS a few times and found it much harder to abstract stuff from devs / create self-service patterns.

That said it's not a walk in the park. You will need to scratch your head a little bit to setup consul + nomad + vault + a load balancer correctly.

Well written!

When I was part of academia I was under the impression we were aiming for publishing papers, which is why I left.

In my first job as a sysadmin I tried my best to support business and two things happened:

1 - My paycheck did not increase when business was successful.

2 - When something broke as a result of assuming risks to deliver stuff, I was blamed, not business.

So I realized the most rational thing I could do was to become a bureaucrat and ended up leaving.

Now I work in a place where business and IT are in the same team and have the same financial incentives. I tend to make reasonable consesions and business people actually care about security and keeping tech debt sane. Pretty cool.

Installing python does not require admin permissions in Windows, just choose $HOME/... as install path.

It also does not require admin permissions in Linux, although most distros do not offer a happy path for that.

+1

My company's internal apps use a mix of VPNs and IP fenced load balancers. We are migrating to app proxy.

No inbound connections + access based on Azure AD identity with conditional access (restrict apps to Intune enabled corporate devices) and MFA is an absolute killer.

My only complain is that connectors are not very DevOps friendly. Cloudflare Tunnel is much better in this area.

+1

During the past three years I went from being my workplace's Windows hater to ditching Linux in my personal machines in favor of Win + WSL2.

I have the opposite use case.

Most of the stuff my company is running is made up of data pipelines and machine learning pipelines. So we have a lot of infrequent jobs that don't really care about latency.

Oof

Makes sense!

I wish Fargate was easier to use and had a scale to 0 feature.

If App Runner ends up supporting private deployments then we can have a true Cloud Run competitor.

Really cool post!

From the architecture, it's not really clear to me why Lambdas have the 15 min limitation. It seems to me AWS could use the same infrastructure to make a product that competes with Google Cloud Run. Maybe it's a businesses thing?

The pricing model is admittedly a bit complex, but from what I've been told it is a fairly common pricing model in this industry

Yes, but that's one of the reasons Public Clouds are thriving.

Not sure if that's the case with others, but I have a really hard time connecting CT with actual applications. My classes were full of complex maths and toy examples, but very weak in actual engineering and heuristics.

I'm a paying customer and I agree.

Meanwhile many core features are still unpolished e.g.: running your own runners sucks and you can't test CI/CD locally.

Yeah models assume future data can be predicted with past data, which of course is not always true in real life due fundamental limitations of statistics, such as very fat tailed distributions in stock markets.

Competent data scientists must be able to spot those cases quickly.

I generally dislike this tone too.

If they really felt sorry for this particular customer, they would be actually solving their issues, not answering with automatic messages.

I generally don't care about certifications, but was convinced to try the AWS Solutions Architect path.

While I'm still studying, I've found many knowledge gaps due learning things through experience. I guess studying something in a structured way definitely has value.

Wait, what? People can do that?

That's the coolest thing since a friend showed me he could move his ears.

Yeah that's my issue as well. I generally forget anything I don't use often and git is full of important stuff that you need infrequently.

"The tendency to spend valuable hours practicing perfectionism resulted in weeks of timeline delays and loss of design integration and verification time."

Students in a nutshell.

Which is why basic stuff like MFA and MDM (block sign-ins coming from non compliant devices) works wonders against ransomware attacks.

ISPs do not know as much as Google/FB thanks to SSL, but they know a lot more than you'd think by analyzing connection metadata.

Also many ISPs are also carriers, which makes things worse.

Source: worked for telecos, have seen a lot of shady stuff myself.

At this point one might consider using a real language and common software practices for type checking, extending, modularization, testing, etc... Instead of building an ecosystem just to keep Infrastructure as Yaml sane.

My experience with Pulumi and AWS CDK is absolutely brilliant in this regard, hopefully good DevOps/SRE/WhateverNewTerm practices and patterns will reassemble good software development practices in the future.

Also true for allowing email addresses with "+".

I guess in an ideal world where everything in your org is behind MFA, app authentication and protected from denial of service, then solutions like tailscale would not be needed.

But my personal experience is that most software is completely hostile to good security practices and you end up having some perimeter security as well.

DinD has many gotchas and I dislike it in general.

Docker is much faster than Vagrant and allows reproducible envs.

I've been using VS Code + its Remote-Containers extension + docker-compose (when needed) and it's absolutely brilliant compared to other options.

I will use Vagrant when I want to avoid Docker in Docker, but I try to stay away from it as much as I can (for local app development).

That said Vagrant is really useful for testing infra, stuff like clusters etc.

My wet dream: MS buys Canonical and Windows + Ubuntu become one.

As a Devops / sysadmin the biggest value MS brings to the table is Azure AD/MDM/PIM. I feel like we really have stepped up our security game with those tools.

I just wanted some Linux distro that had something equivalent. Ubuntu 21 already has native AD integration.

Must be a sign right?

I used to have a car before moving closer to a metro area and going full Uber.

It was a cheap Renault. Malfunctioned twice in ten years. Repair was trivial both times.

Sometimes I think about having a car again, but the sort of stuff you described makes me super nervous.

Cool post, I've seen shit like that first hand in a telco.

BTW this sort of complain always makes me wonder why companies are so bad at managing incentives.

Good ideas I've seen in the hedge fund industry:

- If your employee gives you shares, you cannot sell them for X years.

- If you're a partner and you're paid dividends, you must reinvest those.

- If you leave, you can't work in the same industry for X years.

There are more examples, but the idea is that it's important to make the long term finances of core stakeholders heavily tied to the long term success of the company itself. If you're not doing that, people will exploit the system sooner or later.