Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors • Hacker News Board

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#351

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #337

Kinrany wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there yet an open-source alternative to GCP? Can you buy bare metal and just have your own cloud?

Depends on what is desired... theoretically using Proxmox and VMs containing CapRover hosting docker containers should get you everything you want... but the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.

> the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.

If your business involves any amount of low priority bulk compute, this gets much much easier. You simply let the low priority stuff fall behind while your order to Dell for new servers is being delivered...

Also, if you have compute that could be on-prem or could be in the cloud, you can set up a kubernetes cluster spanning both and let non-privacy-sensitive overflow to GCP as needed.

All of the above rarely comes out cost-effective though, because while the raw compute is cheaper to DIY-it, when you factor in the staff time to build, maintain, and deal with the shortcomings of your bodged-together on-site solution, it's going to come out much more expensive.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#352

Post by doktrin » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #8

> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade. This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now. Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current presiden…

> This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now.

Nothing about Amazon hiring a former NSA director to its board is "tinfoil hat crazy". It's in fact perfectly rational, since Amazon is literally in the business of selling services to the federal government.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#353

Post by nova22033 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #322

gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business?

Going to go out on a limb and say that the NSA is going to have an easier time breaking into your on-prem servers.

Hiring a retired General for influence is as old as this town. People are reading too much into this. This doesn't make it more or less likely for Amazon/NSA/CIA/whatever to steal your data.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#354

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

gigatexal wrote: post #326

koheripbal wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

Personally I have 100% confidence that the big clouds are not going to compromise customer data for their own benefit. Perhaps Amazon did this on an abstract level to understand video streaming and the Netflix business to create Amazon Video but I doubt Amazon would have cared for the tiny startup I worked at here in Hamburg. But the hysteria and the “but what if?” thinking is real and it was really codified in bank…

While AWS is a different operational unit than the shopping one, it is known that they didn't play fair with some vendors. In the end, they cloned some, and ruined some. So the vulture culture exists in parts.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#355

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #344

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. I don't get it. There have been so many postings and comments here on HN and elsewhere about how the cloud is NOT cheap, how they saw they burnt money there, and saved large amounts by doing it for themselves. Not to mention vendor lock in.

A lot of folks mis-configure / mis-manage their instances so as to use way more resources than they really need.

Yah. But that wasn't the case in the cases I remember. They were sometimes very detailed.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#356

Post by Hokusai » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #259

kortilla wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D. This is incorrect. The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals. Google dominated search, Microsoft dominated all business and home PCs for decades, Apple and Google dominated mobile for consumers and businesses, Amazon beat them all to cloud and at…

> The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals Where did their finance came from: previous SF companies and angel investors Where did these companies get their funding from: US government The current companies are only the "daughters and granddaughters" of massively government funded companies in Silicon Valley

> The current companies are only the "daughters and granddaughters" of massively government funded companies in Silicon Valley

Very good point. Many people forgets how much money the state invest, as it should, on technology and to create an industry. From ARPANET to the WWII computers (or NASA), technology needs a level of investment that only states can afford.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#357

Post by newen » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #343

fit2rule wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, come on. This kind of naïveté is contagious. I'm pretty sure you can think of stronger business cases against Amazon/US-Milspec involvement in a non-American business. Amazon, in the hands of Americas spooks, can do a lot of damage to the world of non-Americans; i.e. anyone the spooks decide to hate/target for usurpation. You think Germany is inured from such attention?

I think your being overly paranoid. The effort required to covertly break into an AWS instance and not have anyone in the sysadmin teams know is simply not worth it for 99.9% of businesses. I run a simply mid-level business. Amazon doesn't give a crap about my data - that, above all, is what keeps it safe. I'm just not important enough to bother.

The whole point about mass data surveillance is that your data is not important enough to bother, until it is.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#358

Post by doktrin » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

srean wrote: post #287

qiqitori wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... You may have firsthand knowledge or claim to have firsthand knowledge, but the rest of us don't. When you saw that happening, did you just let it slide? Where did it happen? Was the story originally about Amazon or was it just an off-topic side remark that didn't really fit in?

Not everyone is willing to martyr themselves for a cause. Just because no such information has leaked yet does not mean it has not happened or that there will not be such leaks in the future. Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?

> Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?

Your argument is that we can't prove the absence of a conspiracy.

Hence, a better analogy would be

"why should i stop sawing this branch? just because gravity has never left me suspended in thin air doesn't mean it can't or won't happen in the future"

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#359

Post by tristor » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

brobdingnagians wrote: post #181

ornornor wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company self hosts everything. They’re so bad at it. Something is always down and we waste so much time with our shorty tooling. We even had this amazing idea that we could implement our own version of GCP from scratch. The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs. We’re not a small company, we have about 1k employees and our business is softwar…

I've come to appreciate the value of a really good, dedicated sysadmin. I used to think I was pretty good at it and that was fine, but I've come to realize that the skillset for an awesome sysadmin are quite a bit different than a developer, even though there is some overlap. And there is definitely a range.

Unfortunately the market doesn't appreciate systems operations skills as much as software development, despite those skills being rarer and having a wider organizational impact in more industry verticals. Software developer salaries trend 20-30% higher at every single career stage than sysadmin/ops salaries, and at the top, there's usually management adjacent engineering track stages at larger firms for software developers like "principal", "distinguished", and "architect" which are not open to operations folks.

I was in ops for 13 years, and if you were to talk to any of my former coworkers they would bury you with praise for the quality of my work. Yet, I eventually chose to move into a management track because I had peaked my career about 7 years in and didn't realize it until later. There was nowhere I could go up, because I wasn't a software developer. Now I'm a manager that has technology understanding, which has a high value prop for many orgs all on its own, but I do sometimes miss "getting my hands dirty".

I've worked with a lot of software developers over the years, and while there are a handful who are really incredible, the majority of people are just mediocre. That's expected and okay. The same is true for Ops folks, as it happens, although generally it takes more competence to rise to "Senior" on the Ops side vs software. The thing is, "Senior" is as high as it goes for Ops folks. So you might meet really stellar Ops folks who are effectively titled and paid the same as a mediocre developer with 3 years of work experience. It's simply not sustainable, and the push towards moving everything to the cloud and off-premise is probably a symptom of this (not enough quality Ops folks to keep things on-prem) and exacerbates this (reducing need for quality Ops folks, driving down market demand, unless you want to work at a cloud provider).

Pretty much all of the other Ops people I've respected and admired over the years have moved into different career paths. I find the same is not true for software developers. So when younger people ask me about career paths, I always recommend software over Ops, if they are adamant they never want to go into management.

It's kind of sad, I suppose, but that's the way of it. I appreciate that there's a subthread on HN where folks recognize and respect the value of competent Ops folks, but I think you'll find that most are being pushed out of that career path.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#360

Post by doktrin » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #220

deathgrips wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind. You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much.…

> you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.

Living in Europe I have the pleasure of hearing these kinds of naive comparisons on a regular basis. Somehow it's always "the US is basically China and/or Saudi Arabia".

It's exhausting having to explain to people who are seemingly only capable of operating with a binary black and white worldview that there is a massive difference between certain shades of grey.