Elephant in the Datacenter

I hear conversations at eateries discussing virtual wires to move packets between software endpoints. I believe the problem of moving  packets or making a remote procedural call  (across administrative domains) is already solved. What is not solved is the policy around the movement and invocations. We need to solve this problem if we are to tackle the elephant in the room.  When I listen to end users of technology, their discuss their pressing problem and that is phishing, robocalls, invasion of privacy and at extreme fear of constant surveillance because of AI. The intrusion they are concerned about is not from rogue states but rogue software that runs within our trusted perimeter. This is not going to be solved at the lower levels of the compute stack. This needs a Layer 8 security solution whose enforcement takes place at all seven (or five) layers below.

I spent the last year trying to understand the appeal of blockchain as a data structure and now I am convinced that is how we should look at blockchain. It is a data structure like a class in Java or struct in C. We should use it when we want to store data with access permissions of the owner of the data. When that happens, we will be uploading our photos and storing our documents with a checkbox which says private and that would cause the platform's software to store the datum in a blockchain that is personal to the person who uploads. It is like a vault in the bank where not even the banker can access the contents without your private key.

This massive misallocation of capital to copy cat ideas only happened because of ridiculously low  cost of money. In a rising rate environment, hopefully we will see capital being allocated on issues to which society is waiting for resolution.

Happy Holidays

(Lack of) Trust is killing the World

Not to take on the "Software is eating the world" meme, I believe the pendulum has swung too far in the SD* world.

Automation was the killer app driving the softwarize everything and give it internal guidance (read ML, AI etc.), but at the end of the day it ended up being a great tool for the bad actors who used the automation to conduct fraud, invade privacy and outright steal. Think of an airport with no security where airlines automate all ticketing, boarding, everything. Not a very secure flight is it? The biggest threat to efficiency/automation/AI is fraud, malice and hmm . bad actors or humans.

What we need now is to build a platform that promotes trust not just communication. I went to engineering school when having an email was a privilege given to certain university students. Today I can communicate with my family over four different chat programs. They all use different ones. Do we really need this? Given all these choices, I still could not locate the person who sold me stuff on eBay that never arrived. What's the point?

If software wants to run stuff, the it should be accountable. Is should be trusted. Currently, the only technology that straddles tech and human boundary is Blockchain. These large platform companies should store all PII on Blockchain which should be under the user's control. My digital recognitions from University diplomas to Employee of the Day award should be on my personal chain. When we get to a point where I get alerted for when someone or something (read SW) is accessing my data using my public key on any platform or within any organization, only then will people trust these newly classified communication services companies. Until then, I think SD* will be put on hold. Enough of efficiency, I just want my privacy back!

Pets and Cattle

Any pet owner will understand the pain felt by the owner of the pet that died on United Airlines. What essentially happened is that flight attendant dealt with the pets as if it were cattle. Your onboard baggage is cattle and the airline is optimized for cattle. This is not a note on UAL or pets, but on the notion in cloud computing that enterprise applications are pets and should be converted to cattle so they can leverage the cloud computing infrastructure.

The market for enterprise software is around $280B and market for infrastructure that includes servers, network and storage is roughly $60B, $40B and $20B. As cloud takes a large upfront cost hit on the infrastructure they want to host workloads that are more sticky that the ones that drive revenues today. Today's workloads are mostly transient. New workloads start on the cloud and migrate out of it as soon as they are viable (business modelwise). So, it is understandable that cloud computing giants are pushing the pets vs. cattle metaphor and exhorting enterprise IT to migrate to their pet applications to the cloud. And why not, the prize is huge. Almost $200B of revenues should it happen. But will it? The case of UAL and the pet reminds us that pets cannot be treated as cattle and when they are the consequences are disastrous.

As any pet parent knows planning a vacation requires careful selection of pet friendly hotels, airlines and destinations. We don't have the same pet friendliness in a cloud yet. Given the economics of the cloud, it will be difficult.

Too many Dashboards

It seems we have a dashboard for every metric and dashboards to pick dashboards. This reminds of the early 2000s when widgets were introduced and we placed a widget for every metric, data stream on the desktop. We have distributed our IT systems and that enables us to monitor everything, but dashboard is not the answer. In fact with so many dashboards I kind of miss the good old monolithic system :)

What we need is an automaton which processes these metrics and takes automatic decisions. Dashboard seems too much like a business process. What would be great is if we get a alert saying "metric reached threshold and controller took some action".. kind of like what we get from our banks when a charge is made or fraud prevented. What would be neat is if we replace a whole bunch of dashboards with a few controllers that execute some policy that was recommended real-time by ML.

One horse or 10K Chickens?

Would you like to ride a carriage pulled by 10K chickens or single horse? The answer is not easy. It is technically cool to distribute a job over many compute units and when done successfully it replaces the workload on a more hospitable economic curve (cheaper, faster, better..). However, not all jobs can be distributed and a complicated system which does distribute it over cheap compute units ends up being so complicated that focus shifts from the job to managing this system.

We just spent over 6 mos trying to distribute a webApp and came to the conclusion that it is not about the app but about the data. We need to distribute the data and have compute thread scheduled on the data. But wasn't that the whole point of OOP?

Anyways, the search for distribution introduced me to blockchain. Here is a distributed network that kind of mimics human networks. It keeps people honest and has potential. stay tuned...