Tuesday, April 26, 2016

DevOpsDays London 2016

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April London was cool. But DevOpsDays London was hot and happening, selling out its venue in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In many respects, it was a fairly typical DevOpsDays event with a focus on organization, process, and culture over individual products and toolchains. 

In other respects, it reflected the evolution of DevOps from something most associated with Silicon Valley “unicorns” to a core set of principles, processes, and practices that are broadly applicable. Also reflecting a location not far from the City of London, Barclays was a major sponsor and both financial services firms and major system integrators were well-represented in the audience and in the booths. 

With that as preamble, here are some of the discussions and other topics that caught my eye in one way or another during the course of the two-day event.

Metrics matter

As Splunk’s Andi Mann  observed in an open spaces discussion, it’s nice to measure the things that you do—but it’s even better to measure what you actually accomplish. And better still is to measure accomplishments that closely map to business outcomes rather than IT outputs. 

One participant noted that “We had all these metrics. 1100 of them. We ran a report every month. But why do these metrics matter? Will it help someone make a decision on a daily basis?” Another wryfully observed that "shipping crap quicker isn't a metric anyone should want to measure."

This led to further discussion about the distinction between metrics, alerts, and logs—something that was also touched on in some of the presentations. Google’s Jeromy Carriere pointed out that, in contrast to logs that enable root cause investigation, "alerts need to be exciting. If they're boring, automate them."

Enterprise DevOps

As I wrote above, there was a significant enterprise, even conservative enterprise, angle to the event. For example, Claire Agutter talked about how to “Agile your ITIL.” (I suspect there are Silicon Valley companies lacking a developer who even knows how to spell ITIL.) 

Claire observed that “the reason companies look away from ITIL is it looks bureaucratic” even though "it's how IT gets done in many organizations.” She pointed out that the issue is that ITIL has been implemented as a slow-moving waterfall process in many organizations. However, it doesn’t need to be and, in fact, the best way to think about ITIL process is simply that it’s a consistent way of doing things. And what’s a great match for a consistent way of doing things? That would be automation (using a tool such as Ansible.)

Bimodal IT?

Arguments about definitions and appropriate models often seem a bit “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”-ish to me. I mostly felt that way when I was an analyst (and analysts generally love creating definitions and models) and I certainly feel that way now. That said, it seems to have become sufficiently trendy to bash Gartner’s bimodal IT model (see e.g. Kris Saxton’s "Bimodal IT:  and other snakeoil” from this event) that I feel compelled to respond. 

Most of what I think is worth saying I have already and won’t repeat here. But, really, Kris largely made my general point in his talk when he said: "A lot of people take away the headlines. The details are largely sane but [bimodal is] most problematic as a vision statement communicated from the C level.” I guess I have trouble seeing the problem with a largely descriptive model for enterprise IT that will inevitably be upgraded and replaced in pieces and at different rates. And CIOs who don’t bother to read beyond the headlines and latch onto this (or any other model) to justify simply maintaining the status quo? Well, that organization has bigger problems than a Gartner model that’s possibly insufficiently nuanced or visionary.

DevOpsSec

I led an open spaces discussion on best practices for security in a DevOps world especially when there are compliance and regulatory issues to consider. We actually ended up having two back-to-back security discussions; the one prior to mine focused on what “tolerate failure” means in a security/risk context. In practice, the discussions flowed into each other. In any case, the only issue was that so many people wanted to participate that it was a bit hard for everyone to pack themselves in!

The shared experiences around security were generally consistent with what I’ve heard in other discussions of this type. For example, there was a lot of interest in automated vulnerability scanning using tools such as OpenSCAP. Also mentioned was using human and machine-readable formats such as Ansible Playbooks to document processes and ensure that they’re followed consistently. (Alas, also consistent with other discussions was the familiar refrain that a lot of auditors are still not prepared to move beyond whatever paper-based checklists they’re already familiar with.)

My “the times they are a changin’” moment came though when someone piped up that he was one of those security guys that are often described as roadblocks to rapidly releasing software. He went on to add that this was the first conference he had ever attended that was not an explicit security conference and he was going to go back to his company and recommend that the security team attend more events of this type. This really highlighted just how siloed security processes can be while providing a hopeful illustration that DevOps really is starting to create new opportunities for collaboration and communication.

This last point is crucial. I know folks who get a bit grumpy about the degree to which DevOpsDays majors on culture rather than the cool tool du jour. Tech is important both as a platform and a toolchain for DevOps certainly. However, so many of us operate in an environment where it’s so natural to fixate on the latest shininess that it’s useful to be regularly reminded about the degree to which culture and more open organizations are even more fundamental components of digital transformation.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Connected Things 2016 recap

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The Internet-of-Things (IoT) and DevOps seem to be in a race to win the “most conferences/events” race. The IoT corner notched a pair last week with the Linux Foundation’s new OpenIoT Summit in San Diego and Connected Things 2016 put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum at the Media Lab in Cambridge.

I haven’t looked at the contents from the OpenIoT Summit but I do have thoughts from Connected Things that mostly reinforced everything else I see going on in the space.

Everyone’s talking.

This 500 person or so event sold out. This is clearly a hot topic and there’s a sense that it must be important. As we’ll see, the whats, the hows, the whys, and the the wherefores are a lot fuzzier. I’ve been through plenty of these new technology froths and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen quite such a mismatch between the hype and today’s more modest reality. No, hype’s not even quite right. It’s almost more of a utopian optimism about potential. Cue keynoter Rose, the author of Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. This is about cityscapes and intelligent spaces and the automation of the physical world.

But what is it?

At a high level, I think the definition or definitions are pretty straightforward. There’s an element of interfacing the physical world to the digital one. And there’s a big role for data—probably coupled with machine learning, real-time control, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. 

But how should we think about the market and where’s the value? Things get a lot murkier. 

(As I was writing this, an email literally popped into my account that read in part: "That brand new car that comes preloaded with a bunch of apps? Internet of Things. Those smart home devices that let you control the thermostat and play music with a few words? Internet of Things. That fitness tracker on your wrist that lets you tell your friends and family how your exercise is going? You get the point.” My point is that we have to refine our thinking to have useful discussions.)

At Connected Things, IDC’s Vernon Turner admitted that "It is a bit of a wrestling brawl to get a definition.” (For those who don’t know IDC, they’re an analyst firm that is in the business of defining and sizing markets so the fact that IDC is still trying to come to grips with various aspects of defining IoT is telling.) 

In general, the event organizers did make a gallant attempt to keep the sessions focused on specific problem classes and practical use cases but you were still left with the distinct feeling that the topic was coiled and ready to start zinging all over the place.

Data data everywhere. What do we do with it?

Data is central to IoT. Returning to Vernon from IDC again, he said that “By 2020, 44 zettabytes of content will be created (though not necessarily stored). We’ve never seen anything that scales at this magnitude before.” He also said that there will be a need for an "IoT gateway operating system where you aggregate the sensors in some meaningful way before you get the outcome." (I’d add at this point that Red Hat, like others, agrees that this sort of 3-tier architecture--edge, gateway, and cloud/datacenter—is going to generally be a good architecture for IoT.)

What’s less clear is how effectively we’ll make use of it given that we don’t use data very effectively today. McKinsey’s Michael Chui, on the same panel, noted that "less that 1% of the data collected is used for business purposes—but I expect an expansion of value over time in analytics.” I do expect more effective use of data over time. It’s probably encouraging that retail is leading manufacturing in IoT according to Vernon—given that retail was not a particular success story during the c. 1990s “data warehouse” version of better selling through analytics. 

Security matters—but how?

I’m tempted to just cut and paste the observations about security I made at the MassTLC IoT conference last year because, really, I’m not sure much has changed.

MIT’s Sanjay Sarma was downright pessimistic: “We have a disaster on our hands. We'll see a couple power plants go down. Security cannot be an afterthought. I'm terrified of this."

No one seemed to have great answers—at least at the edge device level. The footprints are small. Updates may not happen. (Though I had an interesting discussion with someone—forget who—at Linux Collaboration Summit last week who argued that they’re network devices; why shouldn’t they be updated?) Security may to be instantiated in the platform itself using the silicon as the secret. (John Walsh, President, Sypris Electronics). There was also some resignation that maybe walled gardens will have to be the answer. But what then about privacy? What then about portability?

There’s a utopian side to IoT. But there’s a dystopian side too.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Building a garage hoist for my canoe

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A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to putting together a system that could 1.) Get my canoe into my garage in the winter when there are two vehicles there, 2.) Allow one person to lift it into position, and 3.) Fit it around existing structures, hardware, and other stored items. I’d been storing it on a rack outside but, especially with Royalex no longer being made, I wanted to treat it with a little more care.

The trickiest part, as you can see from the first photo, was that there’s a relatively small three-dimensional volume to fit the 17 foot canoe into. It had to go front to back, clear the garage door opener and garage door, ideally not force me to move the sea kayak, and have room for my small car to slide in underneath. It did all work, but barely, and it meant that I needed to cinch it up fairly precisely.

To start with, I just installed a couple of pulleys to lift the boat, but a Tripper with outfitting weighs over 80 pounds and it was just too heavy to readily lift up and then cinch into precise position. 

Now you can deal with the weight problem by adding additional pulleys so that you’re pulling more rope with less force. However, it can be hard to get the canoe to pull up evenly and I could never get this working in a way that positioned the boat as precisely as I needed it to be.

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I next considered an electric winch. I went so far as to buy one and I think it would have worked but I was having trouble finding an ideal place to mount it and it seemed like overkill.

The solution I ended up with was a manual 600 pound winch that cost under $20 from Amazon. As you can see, two lines go up to a pair of pulleys. (I have overhead beams for storage on this side of the garage so I ended up just tying the pulleys to the existing beams.) One of the lines then heads down over the swivel pulley and is clipped into one cradle holding one end of the canoe. The other line goes through its pulley, which changes its direction 90 degrees to run to the other end of the canoe where a final pulley drops it down to be clipped into the other cradle. 

Don’t read too much into the exact pulleys I used. I had a couple laying around and I bought another couple of “clothesline” pulleys at Home Depot. I could probably have mounted the canoe right side up with just a sling but I think I was able to get it up a little higher this way. (It’s a tight fit; I guess if I ever get a bigger car, I’ll have to revisit this. The canoe gets transported on an SUV.)

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I’ll probably add a couple more clips to the system just to make it a little easier to position the cradles. And, before next winter, I’ll put a backup safety sling of some sort in place. But, overall this system seems to work very well. It takes very little effort to hoist the canoe into place and, once all the rope lengths and slings are properly adjusted, it’s very repeatable and straightforward. The canoe hangs down a bit lower than is ideal but that’s pretty much dictated by the garage door layout.

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Specialists may have their day

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who among other accomplishments led IBM’s early Linux efforts, has a great post up regarding special report on Moore’s Law in The Economist. Among the highlights:

Tissues, organs and organ systems have evolved in living organisms to organize cells so that together they can better carry out  a variety of common biological functions.  In mammals, organ systems include the cardiovascular, digestive, nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems, each of which is composed of multiple organs.

General purpose computers have long included separate architectures for their input/output functions.  Supercomputers have long relied on vector architectures to significantly accelerate the performance of numerically-intensive calculations.  Graphic processing units (GPUs) are used today in a number of high performance PCs, servers, and game consoles.  Most smartphones include a number of specialized chips for dealing with multimedia content, user interactions, security and other functions.  Neural network architectures are increasingly found in advanced AI systems.  

As in evolution, innovations in special-purpose chips and architectures will be increasingly important as Moore’s Law fades away.

I agree with Irving. When I was an analyst I saw specialized architectures largely fail because "why bother when Moore's Law would get you there in a year or two anyway?" I'm not sure the implications of losing the CMOS scaling lever are as widely appreciated as they should be. (The former head of DARPA microelectronics peg them at about about a 3500X improvement over the past couple of decades; you don't lose a lever like that and just go on with business as usual.)

This will have a lot of implications for software certainly. I also wonder about the broader implications of smaller, lighter, cheaper, faster increasingly no longer being a given.

I wrote about this in more detail after the SDISummit in Santa Clara at the end of last year.