401–410 of 697 posts
At this point, it’s very clear that people nowadays choose Rust mostly to be part of the cult rather than clearly understanding its shortcomings and advantages over languages such as C, C++. It has gotten to the point that some devs after watching a YouTube video criticizing C++ for two hours, announce C++ the worst programming language. Unfortunately, such people become decision makers at giant tech companies too.
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What's your assessment of AWS and GCP? Do you think it's likely they suffer from some of the same issues (eg the manual access of what should be highly secure, private systems, the instability, the lack of security)?
As a former GCP engineer, no, the systems are not generally unstable or insecure. There is definitely manual access of data - it requires what was termed “break glass” similar to the JIT mechanism described by the author. However, it wasn’t quite so loose; there were eventually a lot of restrictions on who could approve what, what access you got after approval, and how that was audited. It was difficult to get into t…
A different way to put it is GCP architecture has made different tradeoffs. For example favoring operability over confidentiality*, or scalability over integrity.
This makes sense from its mono-tenant engineering origins. Those were the right calls. Google exported SRE not SecEng.
Frankly, for most cloud customers, it's what they need.
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* Take this break glass process. It arguably shouldn't be possible. If clients need their CSP to be "NSL proof", unable to leak corporate info responding to a national security letter (or any less obligatory rationale) without the corporation knowing, GCP is not their cloud. CSPs mostly consider it more difficult than it's worth to design a cloud offering that can be proven unable to provide a client's data. On the contrary, customers yell if CSP can't restore lost data, like Apple users yell if Apple can't restore iCloud. iCloud Advanced Security is what happens when you build clients the choice -- witness the warnings.
Support drives design choices, not security.
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It reminded me of this one: https://wtfmitchel.medium.com/how-to-get-fired-from-microsof... A lot of similarities, except the medium author was not part of PG but support. He also had recently suffered a brain injury.
Before or after publishing his article?
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It is, but “Microsoft runs on trust” they say. They also say the CEO’s inbox is always open, actually the CEO himself says it in the yearly mandatory training video on business conduct. So it should be safe, in theory, to openly speak out in the best interest of the customers, no? Rhetorical question :)
Don't believe everything people say. Watch what they do. By the way, are you not worried about NDAs and such?
This read was a blast from the past. I'm not going to comment on much from OP and instead give a little of my experience there. Straight out of college in 2017 I joined the Compute Fabric Controller (FC) org as a SWE on an absolutely wonderful team that dealt with mostly container management, VM and Host fault handling & repair policies, and Fabric to Host communication with most of our code in the FC. I drove our te…
2 years of 60+ hours weeks is not good engineering culture, or any kind of culture.
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> For something like Azure, people are nor fungible What I've learned from a decade in the industry is that talent is never fungible in low-demand areas. It's surprisingly hard to find people that "get it" and produce something worthwhile together.
What is a low-demand area?
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Oh my goodness, yes. And how often their role assumption does not work! I need privileges to do thing A, so I assume the role, and even though the role is shown as active, the buttons are still greyed out. Sometimes it works after 10 minutes and 7x F5, most often however I do a complete relogin with MFA in an incognito window. Not distracting at all, and even that does not work sometimes.
Using a magic link[0] from Microsoft refreshes the token instantly, but you have to do in a new tab. It's worked for me anytime permissions don't update after checking out a PIM role. 0: https://aka.ms/pim/tokenrefresh
[This is the single most helpful tip/link from HN I have ever found, much appreciated]
I think this is especially problematic (from Part 4 at https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ): "The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something." Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to first…
if the service is so shitty, why are people paying so much fucking money for it? is microsoft committing an accounting fraud?
Microsoft is an approved vendor in every large enterprise. That they have been approved for desktop productivity, Sharepoint, email and on-prem systems does not enter the picture. That would be too nuanced.
Dealing with a Large Enterprise[tm] is an exercise in frustration. A particular client had to be deployed to Azure because their estimate was that getting a new cloud vendor approved for production deployments would be a gargantuan 18-to-24 month org-wide and politically fraught process.
If you are a large corp and have to move workloads to the cloud (because let's be honest: maintaining your own data centres and hardware procurement pipelines is a serious drag) then you go with whatever vendor your organisation has approved. And if the only pre-approved vendor with a cloud offering is Microsoft, you use Azure.
If only we had a return of netbooks, meaning OEMs finally embracing GNU/Linux on consumer stores, instead of being left to technically minded aware of online stores.