
It's Still About the Applications - dsr_
https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-about-the-applications/
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reggieband
> 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
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.

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AndrewKemendo
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
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?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
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.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Let's be honest - working for the government is a very poor way to affect
change in it. The decision makers are also very far removed compared to
private corporations and certainly so compared to smaller more agile companies
like startups.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I am sitting here, as a government employee, telling you that you can actually
make change. And at least for this problem set, you can make it in an
extremely impactful way.

Whether you believe me or not is up to you.

~~~
craftinator
In what way have you effected change in the government? In what ways have you
seen those around you do so (you must have witnessed this, by your stated
claims)? I was in the military, which is a different beast entirely, but
worked constantly with fairly high level government employees. They always
seemed powerless, and to have accepted that.

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lastres0rt
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."

------
thinkingkong
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.

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mrkeen
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

        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.

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phkahler
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....

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

~~~
tabtab
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."

~~~
scarface74
And this “vendor dependence” is somehow different than government depending on
Microsoft or even older systems that still depend on IBM mainframes.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
You're going a step further in the case of cloud though.

Before you'd at least hire the sysadmins. Now you rely on probably dirt cheap
offshore consulting.

It's just more outsourcing. It comes with scale and as cancer it is just a
reality. Eventually it will have to be burned down.

~~~
scarface74
They won’t admit it, but many companies move to the cloud not only because
they don’t want to deal with administering servers but also because they don’t
want to deal with server administrators.

It’s not like on prem server administrators have a great track record when it
comes to security.

