Post

@davidgerard IAM - no matter what else you can manage to do, which is super hard as you say, the IAM is always a PITA, and totally bound to the provider.

@chiffchaff @oxy @davidgerard When I came back to LinkedIn after a long sabbatical due to health and losing my mother and 3 best friends, my inbox just lame comeons for middling PM-like roles from FAANG. They really do just want compliant meat sacks. Data points: Paul Vixie has just left AWS Security. Dave Thaler has recently left Microsoft. The cult-like structure of late stage capitalist Silicon Valley hierarchies betrays itself.

@davidgerard

It’s complicated on the cloud side because you want to provide services that lock people in, but also provide a migration path for potential customers to move from your competitors. This, invariably, leads to churn where the ‘recommended’ way of doing things is the way that your biggest competitor doesn’t yet have a compatibility layer for.

The best way they’ve found to do this is via pricing. You make things cheap that your competitor makes expensive and vice versa. People build systems that optimise for doing the thing that’s expensive on your cloud as infrequently as possible and then comparing the cost of running it to your competitor always makes you look good. Conversely, when a big customer of your competitor is in this situation, you give them a deal with a massive discount on one expensive thing for three years. The person who leads the transition gets a big bonus because the transition reduces their costs and then leaves the company before you put the prices up.

@davidgerard And everyone I talk to is shocked to hear or in denial that the technology industry collapses every few years.

@davidgerard I've never seen a site-wide region failover practiced in a way that made me feel confident it would work. If US-East went down hard, I doubt very many places would recover gracefully.

@davidgerard hard same. I've gone into multiple startups and taken them from "we have neat software, but our infrastructure is a dumpster fire and our customers are leaving" to "everything Just Works, and we can grow as fast as we want". I'm currently working as a delivery driver.

@davidgerard One of my first jobs was working for Nortel in Harlow, planning a mobile network fibre backbone for Vietnam. It was during the dotcom bubble, so they were a grotesquely rococo organisation that had to resort to interns to do actual work, like implementing Suurbale and Tarjan's disjoint paths algorithm on a secret linux server under a manager's desk, because corporate IT were crap.

Anyway, we were building disjoint paths for robustness, and the problem they kept running into was that, as everything was virtualised, "disjoint" paths often ended up on the same fibre, and if not then the same duct, and if not then the same trench, and if not then along the same right of way. Their redundancy kept on being defeated by backhoe blunders.

So we worked on hierarchical disjoint paths, so that disjointness could be a question of degree, depending on the value of the circuit. When I left they were considering province-level disjointness in paths for high-value circuits.

I sort parcels for a living now.

@davidgerard I am finding myself backing into security work because it is the closest thing to system administration that people will actually hire you to do in a job description. All the old sysadmin skills are still needed, hiring managers just don’t realize that they need them.