S6E7: "Clouded Judgment"

Posted 2021-05-23 23:59
Modified 2021-05-23 22:54
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We do a SFW episode challenge in which Jthan has no self-control.

We review the three biggest cloud providers – AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Just the Tip
• Notes
• 15 Clams
• Errata
• Music

Just the Tip

• Paden got his NAS compromised because QNAP had a backdoor which caused widescale compromises/ransomware.
  • Don’t trash your QNAP devcice though! You can install your own linux.

Notes

Starts at 28m08s.

I was drinking Jonah’s Curse Black Spiced Rum. Paden was drinking New Amsterdam no. 545 Vodka. Jthan was drinking Boulder Vodka.

• Cloud review of AWS, GCP, and Azure.
  • Jthan asks two questions: “Did you use the CLI tools or did you use the consoles?” “Which was your ‘favourite’?”
  • I used the web consoles and “hated GCP the least”.
  • Paden’s was the same.
  • Jthan preferred GCP, but used the CLI tools.
    • He really liked Azure’s CLI interactive mode/“shell” mode.
  • Me:
    • If there’s one word that comes to mind when dealing with “cloud” technology, it’s “overcomplication” (and/or “convolution”).
      • Cloud, by nature, is comprised of multiple layers of abstraction that do more harm than good.
      • All providers were guilty of requiring knowledge of their branding in supplication to knowledge of the technology. (AWS is especially guilty of this.)
      • All providers/platforms are incredibly inconsistent between the others.
      • The overwhelming takeaway was “that was more painful than it needed to be” and “you’d think they’d be doing more.”
    • AWS:
      • It offers a large services infrastructure, and seems to be more friendly to linux-based developers in their tooling.
      • Changes to e.g. RDS DB configuration took forever. Creating a DB takes incredibly long (from initialization to completion, not to the point of being able to use it).
      • AWS needs to consolidate their services and deprecate out or segregate more legacy ones. They need to split out various services to their own separate product platform.
      • “Your nav menu should not look like a wikipedia article.”
      • It is not infra-as-code-friendly as it still requires multiple checks and steps to do a simple turnup. I’d rather deploy on baremetal with config management and iPXE as this at least produces a more structured and predictable and much more widely-applicable infrastructure. (I can apply the same configuration schema to a VM in a VM lab, an AWS EC2, physical dedicated machine, etc. Cloud-specific tooling does not afford this.)
    • GCP:
      • Simplest options and structure of the three.
      • Cross-platform developer platform friendliness due to simplicity at the cost of limited options (but that’s probably a good thing).
      • Much better organization/navigation/UX. I dislike GCP the least.
      • Some operations (e.g. enabling the cloud engine API) take an inordinate amount of time.
      • Configuration requires a little more “ground up” effort (e.g. auth networks don’t have a quick clicky-clicky button for associations w/ security group like AWS).
    • Azure:
      • Seems to offer the largest services structure.
      • Most friendly to Windows development platforms (duh).
      • Signup is painful. The form does not play nicely with browser Autofill which ended up with me selecting Panama as my country – and even though I hadn’t completed the registration process, I still couldn’t go back and change it to my proper country.
      • Spammy options were checked by default.
      • Many XSS requests being made, many things break if you attempt to protect against XSS attacks (e.g. via NoScript).
      • The web UI/UX is very buggy. For instance, it indicated that my (free) subscription didn’t have access to create a server in a region… I selected a different region then selected the first one and worked fine then.
      • Only allowed me to use MSSQL; unintuitive DB setup (MS does not have a monopoly on relational DBs out there, despite what they may think).
      • The docs are OK, but are a necessity because the UX is very nonintuitive (despite it thinking otherwise) – it “tries” to be intuitive, but fails hard.
      • Creating a DB also took long time.
  • Paden:
    • AWS:
      • “Convoluted and complex”
      • Disliked not being able to use his own provided user/SSH keypairs.
      • They make a lot of assumptions about your deployment.
    • Azure:
      • It’s harder to find how to use the free tier.
      • He wanted different instance templates or more of an a la carte configuration for the instance.
  • Jthan:
    • It was simple, but CLI tools the most elegant.

• The SFW Challenge
  • We base our criteria of what constitutes terminology as “NSFW” for this challenge as George Carlin’s original Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television bit. Context was also applied as sexually suggestive/harassing, etc. was also considered “NSFW”. The first to break owes 75USD to a charity of their choosing, the second 50USD, and the third 25USD. Each additional infraction incurs another 5USD to the donation total.
    • You can view his “revised” list here.
  • Here are the tallies with timestamps:
    • Jthan:
      • First to break.
      • “fucking” – 53s
      • “shit” – 2m14s
      • “pissed” – 24m51s
      • “shitty” – 35m26s
      • “fucking” – 1h04m54s
      • “shit(balls)” – 1h31m32s
      • Total: 100USD to American Cancer Society (at the time of notes publication, I have not confirmed his donation)
    • Paden:
      • Second to break.
      • “fucking” – 2m11s
      • “shit” – 4m24s
      • “fucking” – 11m40s
      • “(bull)shit” – 21m20s
      • “piss” – 24m46s
      • Total: 70USD due, but donated 100USD to ZERO – The End of Prostate Cancer (he has provided confirmation of his donation)
    • me:
      • I didn’t break. :) But I donated 110USD to Compassion International anyways.
  • If I missed any, let me know!

15 Clams

In this segment, Jthan shares with you a little slice of life. The title is a reference to this video. (2m16s in)

Starts at 1h20m49s.

Jthan suggests you to do critical thinking about:

• Do critical thinking about:
  • What your workflow is
  • Who your customers are
  • Where you’re sending data
• Stay away from multi-cloud, at least in the beginning.

etc.

if you’re choosing a cloud provider/platform.

Errata

• Spoiler alert, the poll results were incredibly wrong.
  • Do you guys even put thought into your answers? Clearly I’m the most self-controlled of the three of us. :P
• Karma started as a Hindu concept.
  • We represent a greatly oversimplified view of it, though. We know.
• Yes, Paden, Can’t Buy Me Love is by the Beatles originally.
• China is indeed trying to break into the wine industry.
• That very loud razzberry at 11m11s was Paden. Thanks, Paden.
• Even Microsoft isn’t sure how to pronounce ‘azure’…
  • But it’s been around before Microsoft used it.

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories Season Six