Monday, December 19, 2016

Developer will own Security Operations

I have a sneaky feeling that in coming year, the developer will strike big and get operational control of security in a datacenter and enterprise as a whole. Earlier this year, I warned that this should not  happen. Read This.


But I feel now, it is too late. Here is why. We have moved from securing perimeter to interfaces and now are talking about process jails. Some folks call it micro segmentation moving to nano segmentation.  From a ops person POV this means several orders of magnitude increase in number of endpoints that he has to identify and operationalize. i.e. he cannot do it. It will have to be done by software. And the developer owns software.


Yup, software is eating the world. It just ate the security ops.

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Spark - Yup it is still all bout APIs

Having spent over 6 months now reading and practicing with code snippets on the big data ecosystem, the epiphany came to me that all I was doing was learning a new API. In fact, I was learning three new APIs: RDD, DataFrame and DataSet. It wasn't so obvious when I started reading about Apache spark. See the beauty of APIs is that it speaks the language of a developer and as a developer at heart and training I can easily understand what is being said.

All the stuff I had to read to get to this epiphany about Scale, R, NumPy and in-memory databases, keeping data in CPU registers and not in L1/L2 cache was just all confusion that kept me to from getting to the core. It took six months to weed through so much garbaget to get here.

Ok, so these three APIs help you deal with data. And depending upon the data, you pick one of these. The more structured your data the more you think of datasets and dataframes over simple RDD. And that is all there is to it.



Sunday, March 13, 2016

Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Streaming Data Processors

When AlphaGo beat the human last week using ML to process a small set of board positions which its computing power could process, it proved that Deep Learning ML (that which uses algorithms vs. simply data) has arrived. But can the same machine analyze a streaming set of unrelated mouse clicks to identify a "hack"? Could it have blocked the hacking of NY Fed and saved Bangladesh $100M of lost funds?

As I refresh my understanding of ML - this time with Spark MLLib. I am thinking that this use case of streaming data analyzes with ML or Deep Learning is the NBT (Next Big Thing). To run this type of computational jobs, one requires a cloud because no small cluster will do and it needs a special fabric of the network because nothing enforces better than a policy on the network. Next generation compute systems and specially memory/microprocessor arch has found its killer app in streaming data processing just like GPUs found video games. This time the games are played by hackers and loss is measured in hundreds of millions.  

Sunday, March 06, 2016

Microservices and Container - Not perfect together


There is a continuous turf battle going on since 1990s between developer and deployer (a.k.a Admin). Currently the admin controls the security, scale and size of the application. The developer controls the content, architecture and interfaces to other systems. Two new emerging technologies empower (or shift power) these two constituencies. Microservices empower the developer while container empowers the deployer/admin.

If either wants to take off, they need to find other partners not each other. If microservices want to take off it needs to get the container monkey off its back. It shifts the responsibility of security and scale on the developer and away from the deployer. Developer should ideally be limited to interface design and selection of abstractions that make logic easy to codify. If the security and scale fall in the hands of developer it is going against the grain of the evolution of application where binding is done as late as possible and certainly not at design time. A datacenter administrator will be very uneasy deploying applications where developer has coded in the security policy and scale limit.  

Container has a similar story. Container is not a disruptive technology like it is portrayed to be nor is its effect as tectonic as virtualization or  Java/JVM. It needs to find a partner in a deployment technology like a vagrant or rails or PaaS. Currently its main value proposition is the time to bring up a execution environment. But to get that one has to give up security, naming, directory and identity. In other words, what it is doing is pushing those decisions to the developer who is the most ill equipped to handle those.  

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

JESOA


In continuing my education on Microservices, I came across a blog which gave a formula for SOA. In essence the formula says remove ESB, SOAP, Persistence (Reliable Messaging) and centralized governance and add containers  + PaaS. That is the microservices definition.

There was a initiative a while back called JEOS for "Just enough Operating System". May be we should try that for Microservices equation as a function of SOA. It is just enough SOA.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Microsoervices

In trying to understand the difference between Microservices and Web Services (Circa 2002), I cam across this definition.

"..., the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies." source: M Fowler


When web services started a similar definition was put forth. The main focus then was to get away from Java RMI into a light weight HTTP based communication and bring in language independence (then championed by Microsoft's CLR). As we implemented web services it became quite obvious that HTTP was quite heavy weight and language independence was not very economical. In fact what worked was language homogeneity with standardization on language that could shed weight for simple tasks and leverage a framework for heavy lifting. 

One of the biggest innovations in Java was the built in packaging and (later) deployment mechanisms. In fact most of the appeal of Java was in its "platform" features and not language features. This whole CNA biz smells a lot like language once again taking control of deployment and not leaving it to operations. We are seeing a application ops profession asserting itself. 

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