Sunday, May 24, 2020

NoOps, DevSecOps, Cloud Functions, Serverless

I just stumbled across Tom McLaughlin's 3-part series on serverless.: (part-1, part-2, part-3). Tom was bitten by the NoOps Serverless bug because of its promise to relieve the pain of managing people and process associated with the mundane and painful 24x7 operation of web services.  For Tom, there is no need to consider alternatives.

Yesterday, I had an hour-long debate with a very-intelligent mentor and friend about the economics and total cost of ownership for NoOps.  There are many devils in the details of each business and each situation.  For small and non-tech businesses right now, the public cloud providers charge too much for each API call of their libraries in most serverless settings.  If your business requires predictable, high-availability services with neither distractions nor overhead of consultants or employees who "operate" or develop your operations (DevOps) then the TCO model of maintenance favors serverless.  If I were a consultant, I would develop a complex TCO spreadsheet model and questionnaire to enable companies to make the right choice now and revisit their choices as public cloud costs change.  But if you are a scrappy small business where everyone wheres "many hats" (works in many different roles), it is less expensive in the short term to burn all the labor hours and do the DevSecOps yourself.  If there is clear opportunity cost associated with burn-out and the labor of this work, the economics will still swing the other way and you should go NoOps and Serverless all the way down.


Tales from the Planet Earth, edited by Frederik Pohl (1986)


Fantastic potpourri of international cyberpunk from the 1980's. 4/5 Stars.

ship's log (Alliance book 1) by Lawrence P White


The writing (editing, really), characters, and story line are not bad and the premise has some merit. But the science and politics are so awful and the magic system is so inconsistent, I am not going to pursue the series and almost stopped reading. 1/5 Stars.

Hatching the Phoenix by Frederik Pohl (1999)


I had read this one before and realized I knew the ending about half way through; I got a little more out of it this time because it was a blatant reminder of how much global societal values have shifted away from self-reliance, individual responsibility towards our current ideas that value a totalitarian nanny state and entitlements.  3/5 Stars, probably not worth reading twice.

continuous integration build times


Kelly Sutton takes us on a fantastic journey of how to think about and details of how to optimize your continuous integration (CI) build times. Interestingly and counter-intuitively they concentrated on 99th percentile build times instead of 75th or, shudder, 50th percentile time.  Why?  Because a very-slow build constipates the pipeline, disrupting everyone.  Lots of other insights in the post; it is worth your time to skim the whole thing.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Positive Results: Time to Sell Gilead (GIL) stock?

The New England Journal of Medicine (I love their studies) has published some extremely good news for Gilead's Remdesivir.  Among the interesting results from the study is that the Chinese researchers lied. Remdesivir shortened a patient's time to recovery compared to the placebo group, from an average of 15 days to 11 days. Improvements occurred whether or not the patient was receiving supplemental oxygen. What's more, the data lays to rest any worries that remdesivir has to be given very early after the onset of symptoms. In fact, those participants who entered the trial more than 10 days after the onset of symptoms actually showed a better response to remdesivir than those who started being treated during the first 10 days!

Friday, May 22, 2020

Foundations of Behavioral Economics' Cognitive Bias confirmed


Prospect Theory from the 1979 paper has been confirmed with a comprehensive n=4098 study.

All of our computer hardware is riddled with exploits

I stumbled across this devastating exposé of the hardware we use every day and it is extremely depressing.  All of our hardware contains massive exploits and is surveilling us; and the evil big-government and big-business entities are adding more and more exploits that enable their enemies and common criminals to succeed in attacking us.  I am seriously considering switching to a ChromeBook.

Monday, May 18, 2020

even more good news about our genocidal war against SARS-CoV-2

A company called "Moderna" has announced findings from their first study, that their vaccine likely works.  Also (today), a study was published claiming the immune systems of people who were infected have changed SARS-CoV-2's genome but we don't know what that means yet.

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Compliance as Code in Terraform: behavior driven development (BDD)


Check out terraform-compliance on github and the author's slideshare presentation.  Very slick.  It concentrates on negative tests using behavior driven development (BDD) testing.