Tag: devops

Where IT goes to die

I spent the better part of the last decade at different startups and web companies, but one of my recent consulting gigs led me to a Fortune 500 company. I’ve done work at large enterprises before, but I really did forget what it’s like and it amounted to a rather jarring experience. I’ve entered a deep and dark world of enterprise architecture, frameworks, meaningless acronyms and a cesspool of “enterprise” software where it seems to breed and reproduce uncontrollably. It’s a place with abstraction at every layer, except anywhere that’s relevant.

Sometimes I got a sense that I was warped in time at least 10 years back and that everyone around me was moving at different speed. To paraphrase a famous quote: “It’s not that they are lazy, it’s just that they don’t care”.

I do have to mention some caveats. These are purely observations on IT/Ops and I had barely any idea what was happening on the dev side (which is a problem in itself). I also didn’t have visibility into every part of the organization, so perhaps everything is wonderful in other areas, though I have my doubts.

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Security & Devops

That’s a good post about the inherent conflict between devops and security. I like his points and I think the most relevant item is automation. WAF policies should be one of the core requirements during the development process and similar to identifying everything else. Ideally, it would almost be a unit test during the workflow between qa/dev/staging/prod.

 

https://securosis.com/blog/pragmatic-waf-management-application-lifecycle-integration

OSCON 2012

I’ve been reading through the presentations that have been posted and found a few pretty interesting:

Go Daddy Compute Cloud – light on details. somewhat interesting.

Comparing Open source Private Clouds – nod bad. It’s an overview of the major players in the space, like eucalyptus, openstack, etc. He does mention OpenNebula, but doesn’t include it the comparison.

MySQL advanced replication – from Oracle. Mostly focused on the newer versions of MySQL, so if you’re stuck on 5.0/5.1 for whatever reason you’re SOL. No mention of Tungsten Replicator, which can do awesome things.

Reliability and scale in AWS. – a very good presentation. Succinct and to the point.

Apache HTTPD 2.4.0 – overview of what’s new. Sounds intriguing, though I haven’t tried it out myself.