Cloud infrastructure services have allowed our field to gradually abstract computation tasks from long-standing physical restraints. As cloud infrastructure adoption increased, we realized the power and efficiencies of quick deployments and elastic scaling, giving birth to the DevOps movement. We've been steadily directing more of our attention and resources to what matters most: the applications that differentiate our organizations and create value. We can do this because we spend fewer scarce resources managing and maintaining bare metal infrastructure. As we've moved toward a "paper-cup," ephemeral computing model, these "virtual" components are becoming skeuomorphs; that is, they are features of computing instances that resemble facets of the physical computers they've replaced,...
Startups don't care about security. We hear this a lot. It may be a descendant of "developers don't care about security… that's InfoSec's concern," a situation where at least someone in the organization was paying attention to security. In the developer-dominated world of tech startups, such a statement would be nonsensical. If a startup has dedicated InfoSec staff, they're probably not a startup anymore. To be fair, early-stage startups have a lot on their plate: fundraising, product development, acquiring customers. Speed is of the essence for startups and they need to avoid distractions that can slow them down. Worrying about security too early can feel a lot like building at scale when you only have five customers. In most cases, a focus on security doesn't contribute to the...
Software agents are everywhere in the cloud. These little programs perform often complex or repetitive functions on our behalf so we don't have to. Some agents help us keep our systems updated and avoid configuration drift. Others roam our compute infrastructure in an attempt to keep everything safe from threats. Software agents are designed to make our job easier. However, in cases of large and complex systems where the true value of the agent should be realized, the opposite can occur. Getting approval to install agent software on machines can involve a lot of red tape. Deploying and managing hundreds of agents on multiple hosts can be a real hassle. They can sap compute resources and impede performance. And while agents help us monitor our systems, who's monitoring the agents? ...
The Luminal team headed to Las Vegas last week to attend the second Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference. As we're actively developing on AWS, we were eager to learn about new AWS services offerings, explore the AWS ecosystem of developers, Independent Solution Vendors (ISV) and Systems Integrators (SI), and connect with AWS staff to learn more about how we can build smarter and faster. The level of energy and excitement at re:Invent was something none of us had experienced at a software conference before. There are likely many reasons for this, but we primarily attribute it to the fact that AWS has established itself as the undisputed frontrunner in cloud with significant momentum among developers and ISVs. Attempts by competitors to change the subject with bus...
This Friday marks the 49th birthday of the ideas behind one of the most powerful characters in the command shell (both *nix and Windows): the pipe. For those who don't know, the pipe is this character: | It's Shift-Backslash on a US keyboard, and it is used to send the output of one process to the input of another. The pipe, and its counterparts stdin and stdout, were essentially described in a memorandum written by Doug McIlroy on October 11, 1964. At the time, McIlroy was just beginning to lead the Computing Techniques Research Department at Bell Labs, where UNIX was born. The key sentence we're celebrating is this one: We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose-screw in another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way. McIlroy's memo...
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