Friday 25 March 2011

Google call them 'Cloud Mechanics'

Was at a great presentation in one of the Google Engineering Buildings last night and again have had my head filled full of more dreams and goals by a Google Engineer/ Sysadmin/ SRE Dean called John Looney.

He has some amazing info, views and ideas on cloud computing - the how, where and why and it was real fun to hear it.

He mentioned something that has been mentioned to me before by Mark Minasi, Don Jones, Greg Shields and James Summerlin. Curt has mentioned it as well for the last 6 years I've known the guy.

If you want to keep your job as an IT person you need to get skilled up. 
  • You need scripting skills.
  • You need networking skills.
  • You need security skills.
  • You need to get your A in Gear and be prepared.
What is coming? 
  1. IPv6
  2. Wrapping traffic up in IPsec.
  3. Loosing firewalls and actually probing the headers/ applications/ traffic sources and god knows what else.
  4. Updates that add features not stability or reliability on a bi weekly basis.
John mentioned several things and I took notes for the whole time but will only post some of the snippets...mostly my words and opinions on the comments I heard and understood.

'THIS IS MY DATA, MIND IT, BUT I WANT IT BACK!'

Debugging Clouds....using what Winston Churchill said
...it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma...

SQL doesn't scale well, not a good cloud app.

50% of cloud admins complain system are 'too complex to understand fully' ( recent informal survey of 30 cloud admins)

Complexity+change+pressure= disaster

The two week release cycle.
A great excuse to ship something unfinished and fix it later.

All the failure models of old-school systems can be nitigated with scale.
 (or the world is in big trouble)


Scale can't solve everything.
 ( wiped dns for 5 minutes - GOT A CALL FROM HOMELAND SEC)
Need a plan A, plan B, plan C and on and on.

Use two factor authentications for change.
Use SSL wrappers

There was more, hopefully there will be more, but the notion of a well paid Engineer was mentioned.

The specs that were given for a Cloud Mechanic was impressive though
They add value to a company by getting extra from the software/ hardware/ cloud.
Comprehensive OS knowledge.
Networking.
Software engineering.
Can design efficiency at scale.
Can self project manage and do it well.
Good under pressure ( made the mistakes in some other company)
Never screws up (see above)

They have 15 or 16 of these people and are looking to get 100 to 200 of them.

Where do I sign up? ( I promise I'll learn the stuff)

If you want the full list mail me at mcglynnDOTjoe@gmailDOTcom

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