Marketing Wins
Off-topic post for today …
In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—
Hedge 97: Low Context DevOps
Language is deeply contextual—one of my favorite sayings from the theological world is if you take the text out of its context, you are just left with the con. What does context have to do with development and operations, though? Can there be low and high context situations in the daily life of building and running systems? Thomas Limoncelli joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the idea of low context devops, and the larger issue of context in managing projects and teams, on this episode of the Hedge.
It always takes longer than you think
Everyone is aware that it always takes longer to find a problem in a network than it should. Moving through the troubleshooting process often feels like swimming in molasses—you’re pulling hard, and progress is being made, but never fast enough or far enough to get the application back up and running before that crucial deadline. The “swimming in molasses effect” doesn’t end when the problem is found out, either—repairing the problem requires juggling a thousand variables, most of which are unknown, combined with the wit and sagacity of a soothsayer to work with vendors, code releases, and unintended consequences.
Hedge 96: Mark Nottingham and the Future of Standardization
It often seems like the IETF is losing steam—building standards, particularly as large cloud-scale companies a reducing their participation in standards bodies and deploying whatever works for them. Given these changes, what is the future of standards bodies like the IETF? Mark Nottingham joins Tom Ammon and Russ White in a broad-ranging discussion around this topic.
The Centralization of the Internet
My article on Internet centralization just published over at The Public Discourse—
Hedge 95: Mike Bushong and Agile
We’ve all been told agile is better … but as anyone who’s listened here long enough knows, if you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough. What is agile better for? Are there time when agile is better, and times when more traditional project management processes are better? Mike Bushong joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White on this, the 95th episode of the Hedge, to discuss his experience with implementing agile, where it works, and where it doesn’t.
The Grass is Always Greener
This last week I was talking to someone at a small startup that intends to eliminate all the complex routing from campus networks. In the past, when reading blog posts about Kubernetes, I’ve read about how it was designed to eliminate routing protocols because “routing protocols are so complex.”
Color me skeptical.
Hedge 94: Josh Slater and Quantum Networking
If you’re like me, you’ve heard a lot of hype about quantum—but you’ve never really been able to understand what quantum networking might be useful for. On this episode of the Hedge, Josh Slater, who works in the field of quantum networking, Ethan Banks, and Russ White discuss the current state of quantum networking and potential use cases for the technology. Things are farther along than you might think.
It Always Takes Too Long
It always takes longer to find a problem than it should. Moving through the troubleshooting process often feels like swimming in molasses—it’s never fast enough or far enough to get the application back up and running before that crucial deadline. The “swimming in molasses effect” doesn’t end when the problem is found out, either—repairing the problem requires juggling a thousand variables, most of which are unknown, combined with the wit and sagacity of a soothsayer to work with vendors, code releases, and unintended consequences.
Hedge 93: Dinesh Dutt and Observability
We talk a lot of about telemetry in the networking world, but generally as a set of disconnected things we measure, rather than as an entire system. We also tend to think about what we can measure, rather than what is useful to measure. Dinesh Dutt argues we should be thinking about observability, and how to see the network as a system. Listen in as Dinesh, Tom, And Russ talk about observability, telemetry, and Dinesh’s open source network observability project.