Human Infrastructure 341: Tech Cynicism

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
February 15, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Oh boy. This post calls me out. It’s easy to be cynical about the tech industry because the industry does everything in its power to invite cynicism. But this post from Forrest Brazeal makes a case for why stewing in cynicism may not be the best outlook. In particular, this paragraph jumped out at me: “Frank Herbert got it wrong in Dune: cynicism, not fear, is the true mind-killer. At least fear can motivate you to do something. Even if it’s the wrong thing, you might still learn something from it. Cynicism is the anti-motivator. It says hope is a lie and trying is useless. It says good is not worth looking for.” 

I don’t want to give up on hope, and I don’t want to stop looking for the good in tech. I’m glad Forrest will devote some of his newsletter space to the positives because we could use it. He notes that in his experience, one perpetual bright spot is the people who work in tech: not the VCs or big-money execs, but the regular folks trying to make all this work. I agree. The people in this industry often brighten my outlook because so many of them want things to be better. So I will endeavor to be less dour about the industry. (And it would be nice if the industry put in a little more effort into being worthy of the people who work in it.)  - Drew

Gifted Lane is new to the DevOps world and she tells the tale of one of her first assignments: creating a new environment in AWS using CloudFormation. While this specific tale is about DevOps, the lessons apply to all IT teams and disciplines. In particular, her first move to tackle the assignment was to look for internal documentation. Surprise, surprise, there was none. She then walks through the steps she took to get the project done. Even better, she then decided to create the documentation that had been missing for her. She saw a need and filled it. That’s something we could all do more of. - Drew

Wireshark instructor Laura Chappell illustrates the new TCP conversation completeness feature. What’s it mean? How do you see it in Wireshark? She’s got the answers. - Ethan

Jack Lindamood reviews many infrastructure-related tools and processes he was involved with, tightly summarizing why each was a good or bad idea. You’ll recognize many of the cloud products and automation tools he cites. Jack offers many insightful comments, too. For example, on AWS Premium Support, Jack opines, “It’s super expensive: almost (if not more) than the cost of another engineer. I think if we had very little in house knowledge of AWS, it would be worth it.” - Ethan

Christopher argues that using SSH keys to secure access to a host running in AWS EC2 is not the way. AWS Systems Manager (SSM) is the way. He goes on to explain why (and makes great points). - Ethan

Here’s a handy chart listing what you’ll pay for 1TB of data beyond the free allowance leaving your cloud instance. Over 20 cloud providers included. - Ethan

This piece covers the common 4-pair copper cabling you’ll find at your house and in office environments. If you’ve never come to grips with those colorful twisted pairs hiding in the cable jacket, this is the crash course you’re looking for. - Ethan

Karim continues his Kubernetes series with a post on Gateway API, an alternative to Ingress for getting traffic into your cluster. - Drew

TECH NEWS 📣

Data centers running AI workloads use lots of power and water. Just how much isn’t really known, at least publicly, which is why proposed bills in the US and Europe, and an initiative by ISO, include language requiring assessments of resource usage and public reporting of that use. 

One of the tricky things about AI is that while proponents acknowledge significant consumption of electricity and water, they also say AI can be used to drive efficiencies, whether in computing or other carbon-intensive industries such as aviation. And chips and servers and other infrastructure tend to get more efficient as technology develops. However, there’s also the issue of Jevon’s Paradox, as cited in the article, in which reductions in resource consumption are negated by ever-increasing usage driven by those same efficiency gains.

Tricky questions for sure. But to leave you one data point, this article cites calculations from UC Riverside that estimate a session with Chat GPT-3 (about 10 to 50 responses) “drives the consumption of a half-liter of fresh water.” Gulp! - Drew

Cisco has a few business units that are profitable but low growth. For example Webex and Unified Comms are solid and boring. Shareholders want companies like Nvidia, which added $600B in the last three months (same as Tesla’s entire  market capitalization), and aren’t interested in stable, dull companies. So Cisco leaders are under huge pressure to grow but so far have only managed to slightly increase sales and generate modest profits. Blowing $28B on Splunk had little impact on share price, the cash is spent and now execs don’t have much time to work on growth. Rumors of buyouts and activist investors continue to prowl around the stock analysts. Perhaps they can stave off the inevitable for a few more months if they reduce headcount like every other tech company. Expect more of this but also expect them to keep hiring in other areas. - Greg

Nvidia has released a free hyper-personal LLM that you can load your documents and notes into. Claimed to run completely from your desktop, ‘Chat with RTX’ might be useful as a personal knowledgebase without the data harvesting that cloud AI performs. The idea is to feed it your notes, reports, and documentation so that it can focus on narrow topics. I can imagine feeding in the vendor manuals and internal run books to get useful operational support for front line helpdesk. 

Aside: desktop computer vendors are very excited about this and believe its a massive opportunity to upsell “AI workstations” in an otherwise shrinking market. It’s gonna be messy.  - Greg

Timothy Prickett Morgan discusses Marvell’s new Teralynx 10 switch chip, capable of “128 ports at 400 Gb/sec, 64 ports at 800 Gb/sec, and 32 ports at 1.6 Tb/sec.” Lots of Marvell evolution and competitive comparison from Timothy as well. - Ethan

British Telecom is retrofitting telco cabinets with electric vehicle chargers. Why? Most of these popup cabinets house DSLAMs, but not too many folks are still on DSL. That means there’s enough power budget to supply a level 2 vehicle charger just sitting there waiting to be repurposed. Will we be that resourceful in the US? I’m going with…probably not. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

The Envio project describes itself as “a modern and secure CLI tool for managing environment variables”. This piqued my interest as storing and passing environment variables--usually secrets--into a Python script is annoying. I’ve been doing it via the Pycharm IDE, but…yuck. I’ve considered Hashicorp’s Vault and similar solutions for secrets management, but they always seemed so heavy. A tool like Envio might be adequate for some use cases. The docs even call out a scenario I have in mind--decrypting a set of environment variables and then summoning a Python script that will use them. “envio launch dev python my_program.py” where “dev” is an envio profile you’ve already built. - Ethan

This simple site pinpoints the location of major cloud providers by overlaying dots on a map. You get a sense of geographic distance this way. You can select which providers you’d like to see, and each provider is color-coded. In the nav bar, click through to see service availability matrices for each of the major public cloud providers. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

The terse article points out, “As part of the transition of perpetual licensing to new subscription offerings, the VMware vSphere Hypervisor (Free Edition) has been marked as EOGA (End of General Availability). At this time, there is not an equivalent replacement product available.” That’s a bummer for lab enthusiasts. I am hopeful the VMUG Advantage program, which has offered 365-day licenses of many VMware products including ESXi for $200/year, remains an option. Hopeful, but not expectant. - Ethan

Broadcom’s VMware is radically changing all of its pricing and sales organization. It is possible that there is substantial abuse of free vSphere but it's a much bigger blow to new engineers starting their journey with their home labs. In principle they go on to become advocates for VMware because that’s what they know. Which leads to a discussion of the costs of supporting a community like VMware has done for the last two decades. In the last five years all the vendors have cutback their community efforts while VMware grew. Is that function now bloated and oversized ? Or are companies making short term cuts for shareholder profits and willing to risk long term market position ? Cutbacks to paid technical support are having an impact with their reputation for after market service declining so many people turned to the community. This saves money in one business units but means vendors aren’t in control of the narrative or customer satisfaction. It’s not clear what or why Broadcom is making these changes, their communication has been poor and confused. For now I’ll take a ‘wait and see’ approach and be watching to see if Broadcom respond to customer concerns. That said, it has been three months since the pricing changes and few are happy, I’m not really expecting it to improve soon - Greg

How was SSH assigned TCP port 22? Tatu Ylonen was working on SSH as a replacement for telnet (23) and FTP (21). 22, right in the middle, was unassigned, so he petitioned the IANA for it. And so it was. - Ethan 

Telegeography is an analyst business that tracks the long-haul bandwidth market. This post reviews a recent presentation and report (£$) on how quickly long-haul prices are falling. If you are spending money on new telco contracts this information can be useful to negotiate better pricing and short-term contracts. On average prices are falling at 13% per year, or about 40% over a three year period (55% over 3 yr) thus any new contract should have a reducing price over the period or provisions to break or reneogitiate the contract when a competitor can undercut by some margin. The idea of signing a five-year contract in a falling market is dumb - Greg

LEO satellites are in the early stages of being used to route cell phone communications. For now, text messaging, but more in the future. Larger antennas are planned for orbiting satellites, and more complex distribution algorithms are being developed so that satellites flying in close proximity can work together to manage communications. - Ethan

LAST LAUGH 😆