HS032 Mentors and Leadership
Is there a role for career mentors and coaches in modern IT ? We discuss the topic and establish some points. IT Careers are high value and high effort but unlike other professions (such as law or medicine) there are no gatekeepers to working. This leads to training and ‘life coaches’ that are unregulated and often unprofessional.
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HS032 Mentors and Leadership
Is there a role for career mentors and coaches in modern IT ? We discuss the topic and establish some points. IT Careers are high value and high effort but unlike other professions (such as law or medicine) there are no gatekeepers to working. This leads to training and ‘life coaches’ that are unregulated and often unprofessional.
Rethinking security roles and organizational structure for the cloud
As more and more applications and application development move to the cloud, traditional security roles and organizational structures are being shaken up. Why is that and what are the benefits of a cloud-first approach for business?
Traditional vs. cloud model
Application development in the traditional model, especially in larger companies, can be thought of as a linear process—similar to a baton being passed between teammates (e.g. the application team hands off the baton to the security team). In this model, each team has their own area of expertise, such as networking, infrastructure, or security, and the application development process is self-contained within each team.
The downside to this model is that responsibilities are siloed, and interactions and hand-offs between teams create friction. For example, if one team needs something from another, they need to submit a ticket and deal with wait time. In the traditional model, it’s not unusual for the application development and deployment process to last weeks or months, and then there are bug fixes and new release rollouts to contend with.
A cloud model, on the other hand, offers several benefits, including automation, abstraction, and simplicity. The high degree of automation in cloud-native infrastructure in general Continue reading
How OCSF Aims to Simplify Network Security Monitoring
The Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) defines an open specification for the normalization of security telemetry across a wide range of security products and services.Introducing thresholds in Security Event Alerting: a z-score love story
Today we are excited to announce thresholds for our Security Event Alerts: a new and improved way of detecting anomalous spikes of security events on your Internet properties. Previously, our calculations were based on z-score methodology alone, which was able to determine most of the significant spikes. By introducing a threshold, we are able to make alerts more accurate and only notify you when it truly matters. One can think of it as a romance between the two strategies. This is the story of how they met.
Author’s note: as an intern at Cloudflare I got to work on this project from start to finish from investigation all the way to the final product.
Once upon a time
In the beginning, there were Security Event Alerts. Security Event Alerts are notifications that are sent whenever we detect a threat to your Internet property. As the name suggests, they track the number of security events, which are requests to your application that match security rules. For example, you can configure a security rule that blocks access from certain countries. Every time a user from that country tries to access your Internet property, it will log as a security event. While a Continue reading
Announcing Project Northstar: SaaS delivered Multi-Cloud Networking and Security
Multi-cloud architectures are becoming an increasingly central part of enterprise strategies delivering applications reliably. In a VMware Digital Momentum Study of enterprise technology decision-makers, nearly 73% report they are standardizing on multi-cloud foundations to operate applications and infrastructure1.
Multi-cloud infrastructure offers many benefits – such as the ability to scale quickly and increase reliability. By extension, multi-cloud deployments can help businesses:
- Innovate and transform the customer experience
- Scale and grow the business
- Empower employee engagement and productivity
Yet, from an operational and technology perspective the multi-cloud presents a major challenge: Complexity. Rapid innovation and growth require the ability to deploy and manage workloads in any public cloud while providing the required service availability and scale. However, managing workloads and infrastructure on multiple clouds at once significantly increases the complexity of the network architecture connecting these applications and clouds. It also requires businesses to deploy complex security rules to protect lateral network traffic while having to rely on limited workload mobility and visibility and threat detection capabilities that do not scale.
Successfully adopting a multi-cloud infrastructure requires a means of taming the complexity that is inherent to multi-cloud.
Introducing Project Northstar
We are introducing Project Northstar, a new technology preview, Continue reading
Announcing DPU-based Acceleration for NSX
We’re delighted to announce that VMware NSX can now leverage DPU-based acceleration using SmartNICs. This new implementation allows VMware customers to run NSX networking and security services on DPUs, providing accelerated NSX networking and security performance for applications that need high throughput, low latency connectivity and security. The DPU-based implementation also enhances network observability across different workload types while simultaneously increasing the host resources available to applications.
DPU-based Acceleration for NSX is a result of Project Monterey, an initiative that VMware began two years ago. VMware is delivering on Project Monterey with VMware vSphere 8, announced this week at VMware Explore. Combined with other future innovations introduced by Project Monterey, such as the ability to support VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) networking and storage for bare-metal workloads, DPU-based NSX acceleration will free up networking and security teams and developers more than ever from depending on generic host computing resources to power operations.
Figure 1: Solution Overview
While we’ll continue to offer full support for hypervisor-based NSX architectures, the option of running NSX on a DPU offers several major advantages for industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, and telecom providers that require accelerated network performance.
What is a DPU or Continue reading
Java — A fractal of bad experiments
The title of this post is clearly a reference to the classic article PHP a fractal of bad design. I’m not saying Java is as bad as that, but that it has its own problems.
Do note that this post is mostly opinion.
And I’m not saying any language is perfect, so I’m not inviting “but what about C++’s so-and-so?”.
What I mean by “bad experiments” is that I don’t think the decisions the creators of Java were bad with the information they had at the time, but that with the benefit of hindsight they have proven to be ideas and experiments that turned out to be bad.
Ok, one more disclaimer: In some parts here I’m not being precise. I feel like I have to say that I know that, to try to reduce the anger from Java fans being upset about me critiqueing their language.
Don’t identify with a language. You are not your tool.
Too much OOP
A lot of Java’s problems come from the fact that it’s too object oriented. It behaves as if everything is axiomatically an object.
No free-standing functions allowed. So code is full of public static
functions, in classes with no Continue reading