2022-04-28 Thursday - NSA re-awards $10B cloud computing contract to AWS

• https://www.fedscoop.com/nsa-re-awards-10b-wildandstormy-cloud-computing-contract-to-aws/
• https://www.engadget.com/amazon-web-services-re-awarded-nsa-cloud-contract-152924596.html 
• https://www.pcmag.com/news/despite-microsoft-protest-amazon-wins-10-billion-nsa-cloud-contract-again
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31186481 
  
•  https://siliconangle.com/2022/04/27/nsa-re-awards-10b-cloud-computing-contract-aws/
• https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/04/28/nsa_wands_aws/
• "The contract, codenamed "Wild and Stormy," is the successor of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) IT contract, awarded to Microsoft in 2019, and later killed off by the Pentagon after several protests from rivals including Oracle and Amazon." 

2020-06-21 Sunday - Manning Publications - 2020 Books of Interest

There are many excellent new titles (and some updated 2nd editions) - coming later this year, that may be of interest  (and benefit) to you (or, members of your organization) - from Manning Publications Co. , and I look forward to hopefully having a chance to review many of them.

Check them out here (in publication date order):  
https://www.manning.com/catalog/sort/sort-by-date

For example:

• GraphQL in Action
• Kubernetes in Action, Second Edition
• Blockchain in Action
• Machine Learning with TensorFlow, Second Edition
• Microservices Security in Action
• API Security in Action
• Graph Databases in Action
• Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Rust in Action
• Serverless Architectures on AWS, Second Edition
• Bootstrapping Microservices with Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform  
• Kafka in Action
• Math for Programmers
• Modern Fortran
• Terraform in Action 
• React Hooks in Action
• Deep Learning with Python, Second Edition
• Grokking Machine Learning
• Microservices in .NET Core, Second Edition
• Quantum Computing for Developers
• Core Kubernetes
• Exploring Data with R
• Functional Programming in Kotlin
• Getting Started with Natural Language Processing
• GitOps and Kubernetes
• Istio in Action
• R in Action, Third Edition
• PySpark in Action
• Spring Security in Action
• Getting Started with Kubernetes
• Spring in Action, Sixth Edition  

2020-05-13 Wednesday - There Is No Free Lunch

Photo by Divyadarshi Acharya on Unsplash

Today's Meditation: There is no free lunch.

If someone is trying to sell you a "silver bullet" solution/platform - something that they claim is faster/cheaper/easier - you need to stop and ask some deep and probing questions - of them, and of yourself.

How open/available is access to their documentation and training for their platform?

Is their source code available to you, as a customer (i.e. think risks to your own business continuity)?

Are they willing to put their source code in escrow - to include all of the DevOps scripts that would be needed to automate standing-up your own instance (i.e. if they were to cease business operations)?

How frequently can you obtain full data extracts (and, what will be ongoing costs to keep a recent/fresh extract updated)?

What are you giving up?

What risks are being transferred to you?

What choices are being taken away?

What are the unintended consequences of the trade-offs being made?

What will you do if that company goes bankrupt?

How will you recover your data?

How will you replace/rebuild the functionality their platform delivered?

How quickly can you recover/replace that business functionality (and data) - if they were to cease operations tomorrow?

Even if you did obtain a guarantee of source code being held in escrow - how long would it take you to assemble an engineering team and configure the required infrastructure resources to self-host the solution?

Is it even feasible for you to test this apocalyptic scenario - on a regular basis?

And, if someone is dismissive of these kinds of concerns - or, dismissive of your architects who may raise them - you should really pause and ask what is their true agenda.

2015-02-24 Tuesday - Seattle AWS Architects and Engineers meetup

Tonight I attended a presentation organized by the Seattle AWS Architects and Engineers meetup group:
http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-AWS-Architects-Engineers/events/219822234/

Rob Cummings (Operations Group Manager, with Nordstrom) discussed the AWS adoption within the Nordstrom enterprise - and the organizational change management and cultural shifts involved.

2009-03-28 Saturday - Cloud Forecast: Stormy

Open Cloud Manifesto v1.0.9

A look inside the 'Open Cloud Manifesto'

Amazon, Microsoft reject 'Open Cloud Manifesto'

The Varieties of Openness Worth Wanting in the Cloud

Steve Martin (Microsoft, Developer Platform Product Management): Moving Toward an Open Process on Cloud Computing Interoperability

This site should be live on Monday: opencloudmanifesto.org