Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.
Technology, the internet, cloud, and digital society.
This is a good overview of Privacy Shield, the replacement for Safe Harbour.
The big question is whether it will pass muster by the CJEU. And as many or the original concerns there related to US government surveillance it is not clear whether these have been sufficiently addressed.
Arlanda airport on a February morning as I wait to travel to Barcelona.
Here I am sitting in Stockholm’s Arlanda airport, waiting to board a plane towards Barcelona. I am going to be down there for the week for Mobile World Congress 2016. This is the highlight of the marketing calendar for us. The last few weeks have been occupied with getting ready. Long hours, far too much caffeine and sugar, all the frustration of trying to co-ordinate dozens of people across multiple countries, and aligning different often contradictory messages makes the job stressful and often frustrating.
During the week I will man a stand, organise meetings with employees, media, analysts, customers and partners. I I will act as a spokesman, a bouncer, a recruiter, a foreman, a camera man, an interviewer, an author, a scout and an spy. And I will talk my vocal cords raw (my voice went by the end of the second day last year).
But deep down I will love much of it. I am learning new things every day, about business, marketing and most importantly cloud technology. I rarely consider going back to college, when I learn far more intensively at work every day. I get to do really interesting things, like be one of the small team delivering a huge launch for a Fortune 500 company. But mostly I get to work with really great people. The team is totally international, from and spread around the globe. It is full of smart people who are pushing every day to be better, learn more and do more.
And when it all comes together it is a hell of a rush.
My pre-getting-out-of-bed ritual includes a check on the weather. This morning I see that in Upplands Vasby (the Stockholm suburb where I live) the high will be 1°C and the low -3°C. Which is fine, except the current temperature is below -8°C.
When automated calculations go wrong
And it is not just Weather Underground with this problem. The BBC is reporting similar unusual conditions for Stockholm with a minimum temperature 6°C warmer than it actually is already.
Whoever wrote the system for generating or importing the forecasts must have left out a check to see does the forecast match the current reality. But then again, if they did have one, what can the system do if it finds a mis match? Ask for the forecast to be re-run (a massive computation problem for the agencies that produce them), or try and come up with their own? Neither really is viable. I guess they just have t hope that the theory and the reality will converge during the day.
It’s an interesting problem from a technical point of view though. At the weekend I talked with a guy who works at making sure the reviews you see on price comparison sites are correct. He doesn’t ensure that if someone says a TV is great, that it is. His problem is that when they scrape the retailers websites for product details and prices, they must match the products that internet users are actually looking for. Nothing would damage the credibility of a site faster than if you search for details of a fridge, but the responses include electric toothbrushes.
The solutions of course cannot involve humans checking these things. The volume and variety of things that people look for in the internet mean this all has to run without human involvement. The job of the people is to build and tune machine learning systems that constantly improve the quality of the output.
This is one of the key things that I have learned about Cloud – it’s all about the machines. Providing services on demand to users at scale means automation. Everywhere. From the things people see – you don’t ring up AWS to get an EC2 instance provisioned. Through the back end platforms – the only time a human in Amazon should get involved in your bill is when it becomes so big that they feel you need your own account manager. All the way through to the management of the underlying infrastructure.
A metric I was given recently was that in a traditional data centre 1 person can manage about 50-300 servers. In a Hyperscale data centre like Google’s or Facebook’s it is well over 10,000 per admin. Why? Because of automation. As well as enabling the system to manage itself (I am sure they rarely see “routine” errors), automating everything also removes one of the biggest causes of issues in the first place – human error.
Of course this isn’t easy to do (or everyone would be at it). Cracking the problems of automation, governance, and machine learning has enabled the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook to scale to the size they have, without collapsing under the need to recruit half the planet to be admins for their infrastructure.
The challenge then is bringing that capability to everyone else. That’s what the teams I work with are doing, and is one of the reasons why I am (usually) happy to head into work each morning, even if it is -9°C.
..and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Because they were all in the office writing and re-writing press releases, media statements, FAQs, powerpoints, demo instructions, invites, blog posts and recording explanatory videos.
If you want to know what cool stuff my colleagues and I are working on, then see us in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2016 next week. We will be in the Cloud Area of of Ericsson’s stand in Hall 2 all week.
We will be talking about Cloud (public, private, and hybrid), security, governance, data centres and hardware, and data storage, and analytics. All of Ericsson’s cloud stack really, and we will be making some interesting announcements.
Hopefully I will see some of you there.
I haven’t coded for years*. But I was drawn to this story in The Register about customers and scary code. One of their examples was of a piece of terrible code that it took two embarrassed engineers a week to figure out. I was chuffed that I saw what was wrong straight away. Can you?
int SUCCESS = 1;
int status = getStatus();
logger.debug("Got Status:" + status);
while(SUCCESS) {
//Do all the clever things
status = getStatus();
logger.debug("Got Status:" + status);
}
Maybe if this whole Cloud Strategy and Marketing thing doesn’t work out I can go back to being a coder.
* My last serious coding was probably in 2004 when I was working as an Oracle developer and DBA. I worked for Accenture at the time and the customer was a large European mobile operator. We were building them a system to integrate with an external loyalty card platform. I ran the team building the database and we also had to code all the stored procedures the devs working on the business layer were using. I had made the jump from Microsoft SQL Server to Oracle 9i running in Solaris. And after getting over the initial steep learning curve I loved all the control and power I now had over the environment. I ended up writing scripts to build, deploy and manage everything. No more check lists of Microsoft things to click on.
Since Safe Harbour fell last year it has been interesting watching the efforts to replace it. Max Schrems is to be congratulated for bringing to an end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the previous arrangements. Now everyone seems to admit they were inadequate and a replacement is needed.
The trick is how to get there when there can be very different views on privacy, people’s rights (especially non citizens), and expectations around them.
One of the interesting perspectives I read about it all was this one from Ars Technica, which talks about the way the original CJEU ruling was framed. As they say:
The careful legal reasoning used by the CJEU to reach its decisions will make its rulings extremely hard, if not impossible, to circumvent, since they are based on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
So a fudge around tweaking existing laws or regulations will not be adequate.
Most of the discussion on the replacement have been happening behind closed doors, though there have been plenty of leaks. According to The Register the need for reform of Safe Harbour had been seen for a while, and suggestions had been made. However:
Not one of those recommendations was implemented by the US before the European Court of Justice struck down the agreement. Since October, occasional leaks over the negotiations have repeatedly pointed to intransigence on the part of the US intelligence services as the main stumbling block.
With the January 31st deadline about to expire things are down to the wire. I see now (via Jonathan King) that the US senate is pushing through legislation which is supposed to boost protection that Europeans can enjoy in US courts.
Personally I am a bit concerned that the details of this protection seems pretty restrictive and limiting:
the right to request access to records shared by their governments with U.S. agencies in the course of a criminal investigation, correct those records if they are wrong, and sue if the records are illegally disclosed.
That does not seem to address the routine data slurping that has been occurring.
And the legislation is only with a senate committee. An actual vote, or one with the other chamber is not likely to happen any time soon. The questions I come away with are:
And from a personal perspective, how do these new protections for EU citizens compare to the ones Americans get? The latest proposal matches legislation from the 1970s for US citizens. But they also get constitutional protection (in theory) from surveillance by their own state. That is not something Europeans can expect.
I will be surprised if we reach a solution in this before before the end of February. With the EU having to take action after than, companies are going to be looking for local solutions to protect themselves.
One of Ericsson’s global Data Centres outside Stockholm (it was snowing).
Yesterday I was at the opening of Ericsson’s new global data centre outside Stockholm. We were given a virtual tour of some of the building via an Oculus, and a real one through two of computer spaces. It was pretty impressive. Each of the computer spaces has a 4.5MW power capacity. And they can accommodate power densities of 10s of KW per rack (many legacy DCs struggle to go beyond 6-8 kW). The overall site is 20,000sqm and is one of three new global ICT centres Ericsson is bringing online at the moment.
Foto: Ericsson/Lasse Hejdenberg
Back when I started my career, my first job out of college was in a factory working as a process engineer and production manager for the production lines there. A decade or two later my work is all focused around Data Centres and what goes on (and into) them. In a lot of the ways I am back where I started.
The industrial revolution gave us factories that built widgets that everyone bought. Even just twenty years ago your money would buy you real goods. Physical things you could touch and bring home. But now the greatest growth is in digital goods. Gamers pay for ad-ons like levels, maps, avatars, virtual weapons, clothing and vehicles. Children look for new apps for the family tablet. Music, podcasts, films, and books are streamed to billions of devices, and users never even hold a local copy. These are things exist only as 1s and 0s. And for the most part their existence is within a data centre somewhere.
In the enterprise the office server room is dead and gone. IT infrastructure and workloads are all moving to clouds – private ones in for large enterprises, and the vast hyperscale public clouds for companies large and small. Data is the key asset class today.
And the place where it is stored, manipulated, and value is generated from that data is the Data Centre. Which is why Data Centres are the factories of the 21st century.
I am not making moisturizer cream any more, but I like to think I am not too far from where I was 20 years ago.
Irish journalist are getting in a tizzy over some of their own having being monitored by the Gardaí (Police). Except they never seemed to care when the government put the entire country under surveillance in contravention of European Court of Justice rulings. So much for the fifth estate. And kudos to Karin Lillington to pointing out their hypocrisy.
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