Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Hard Truths IT Must Learn To Accept? (cio.com)
snydeq writes: "The rise of shadow IT, shortcomings in the cloud, security breaches -- IT leadership is all about navigating hurdles and deficiencies, and learning to adapt to inevitable setbacks," writes Dan Tynan in an article on six hard truths IT must learn to accept. "It can be hard to admit that you've lost control over how your organization deploys technology, or that your network is porous and your code poorly written. Or no matter how much bandwidth you've budgeted for, it never quite seems to be enough, and that despite its bright promise, the cloud isn't the best solution for everything." What are some hard truths your organization has been dealing with? Tynan writes about how the idea of engineering teams sticking a server in a closet and using it to run their own skunkworks has become more open; how an organization can't do everything in the cloud, contrasting the 40 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner six years ago who believed they'd be running most of their IT operations in the cloud by now; and how your organization should assume from the get-go that your environment has already been compromised and design a security plan around that. Can you think of any other hard truths IT must learn to accept?
The Cloud is your enemy. Fire anyone who offers a "cloud" solution before offering an in-house solution, because I can guarantee you that "cloud" services are only half as efficient as running the hardware in-house. The question really is where do you want your data to be.
If you have privacy concerns (eg credit cards), then machines dealing with credit cards should be co-located in a high-security data center that you know who has physical access to it. If you are simply serving cat videos, then cloud-away, because nobody is going to care if a cat video is slow due to bad provisioning.
But every time, it seems like I have to fight someone as to why it's cheaper to own or lease the hardware in-house rather than "cloud it", because cloud services are not as scalable as you believe it to be. The "cloud" only scales two things efficiently. CPU "TIME" and "Storage Capacity". If your IT is not concerned about these, then it doesn't belong in the cloud. If you are concerned about security or latency, those must never go into the cloud.
If you are crunching numbers, it is cheaper to borrow the CPU power of 500 computers for one day than it is to buy two computers and have them take one year. That is where "cloud" computing is supposed to be used.
Instead we have the morons of IT management trying to put everything into the cloud so they can eliminate IT staff, and the cost of doing this is that when mistakes are made (eg equifax) , nobody knows how to fix it, and it costs substantially more to fix by hiring new staff just to solve one problem.
>> What Are Some Hard Truths IT Must Learn To Accept? ...that IT is not engineering, and that engineering is not IT.
1) Agile is bullshit
2) You do not need to have meetings every day
3) Standing up for a meeting is utterly ridiculous
4) Iteration Managers are a very poor replacement for Project Managers
5) Scrum Masters are a crock. You should not hire these people
6) Kanban is a bullshit methodology
7) Hotdesking sucks. Treat your staff well and give them their own desk.
You mean convert all your API's into JSON calls and spin up gajillion web services? Why? That increases complexity. Native-app-language-to-native-app-language is much easier than app-language-to-JSON-back-to-native-app-language.
Can't cloud do monolith? If not, what's stopping it? The performance bottleneck usually is and should be the database anyhow for must CRUD apps. Kajillion web services won't solve that. The CAP Theorem (Eric Brewer) limits your options and probably shouldn't be an app-side concern anyhow, but mostly a database side issue.
This kind of hype created a bloated stack in our org that requires dealing with 4x more code than a normal stack would. Nobody can give practical examples of the use of such splitting: they just spit out vague buzzwords stolen from Dilbert's boss, or dreamy shit like "what if we grow to Amazon.com size"? -- Yeah Right. We are more likely to get hit by a meteor while buying a lottery ticket on a unicycle.
Plus, these extra web layers seem a security risk: more doors for hackers to pick the locks of. Who is spreading this microservice rumor/hype? Russians? Microsoft marketers? Wrox? Knock-it-off!
Martin Fowler said:
As far as general IT advice:
1. Data tends to outlive application software, so focus on good data.
2. Be wary of wasteful hype. Let somebody else be the guinea pig. When that somebody else has it running well, THEN borrow the idea.
3. Books are judged by the cover for good or bad, so throw the executives a pretty bone for a few high-visibility parts of a system, but keep most of the regular stuff (grunt screens) in something easy to create and maintain. Don't drag down the entire system chasing eye-candy and UI fads. By the time you're finished, it'll be obsolete anyhow.
4. "Separation of Concerns" is a myth. Most non-trivial concerns inherently inter-weave among each other. You want to manage concerns well, not outright separate them with thick Trump Walls.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sure those blog posts from 2008 are fascinating, but when I see someone plugging twice his own blog in a Slashdot comment, it's an immediate SEO red flag.
This led me to google "Bruce F. Webster", and wow, dude did you really create your own Wikipedia entry using your own blog as source?
There's nothing in your bio that even remotely justify a wikipedia article, that's more like a LinkedIn profile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
if I wasn't a lazy bastard I'd edit your page to flag it as a WP:PROMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Where are the wikipedia nazis when we need them.
lucm, indeed.
Where are the wikipedia nazis when we need them?
They became write supremacists .
-- I have a private email server in my basement.