Well, they were right about one thing - a ginormous room to house computers in their novels. Let me explain.
Tam writes (and I wholeheartedly agree) that "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is Heinlein's finest novel. Go read her kind-of review, but this part triggered a thought:
About the most noticeable anachronisms are that almost all communication seems to be by wired landline, although low powered suit radios are mentioned, and the idea of a huge room-sized computer running most of the moon is odd if you allow yourself to stop and think about it, but the plot steps along well enough that you probably won't.
Strangely, a huge room housing a computer that runs the Moon is sort of what's shaping up in today's modern IT technology. Computing is racing to "The Cloud" which is a series of technologies that let you basically rent computer time from service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). The key breakthroughs that made this possible include:
- Ubiquitous high speed Internet access;
- Scalable, reliable, Open Source operating systems (e.g. Linux)
- Enhancements like Docker and Kubernetes that let microservices spin up as needed, and spin down when they are no longer needed.
What's weird is that things have come sort of full circle from the 1960s and 1970 where you had the computer room behind glass walls and you submitted programs to the Operator at the desk. Only now everything is automatic and controlled through an API.
What's driving this is that if you use the Cloud you get a lot of benefits:
- Higher availability that you could likely afford on your own. Maybe not the fabled "Five 9s" (99.999% uptime) but for sure 3 Nines. This is probably prohibitively expensive for you to do on your own because you have to buy a bunch of servers and put them in geographically separated data centers.
- Better security than you could probably afford on your own. Good security is expensive, but if the servers are cookie-cutter installs then one security guy can cover a lot more of them. Remember you need both computer security as well as physical security for the data center, which don't come cheap. The Cloud dramatically lowers the cost to run a secure data center because you amortize the cost over many customers.
- You don't need as much hardware because more capacity spins up as you need it and spins down when you don't. You only pay for what you need, rather than a big fat check to cover the peak if you were to do it on your own.
And so things look like this now:
I think Heinlein and Asimov would recognize this instantly.
What's really weird about all of this was this story from Back In The Day. I was at an early Internet conference (1992?) at a session on High Speed Networking (back then, 200 Mbps was righteous). One presenter made the comment that if you imagine a fast enough network you could run the entire country from Data Centers in Kansas City. We all laughed.
Except maybe you could run the country from Data Centers in Kansas City. Funny how what's old is new again.
17 comments:
Not only would Heinlein and Asimov understand, but you could add that server farm into 2001 A Space Odyssey without it being noticed.
The days of mind blowing science fiction. I learned to read with it as a kid. Those guys would weep at what has happened to the genre today.
I would agree that The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress may be his best work, although I thought the political and civic questions in Starship Troopers were an honorable mention.
The past really is prelude.
I remember talking to someone that worked for a major telephone company back in the eighties. He knew a lot about the research and development end of the company and explained how what we were using was being developed two decades before. It made me wonder about technological advances, and where they will lead. Considering what we do have for examination, it's almost mind boggling to think about what's to come.
"Better security than you could probably afford on your own. Good security is expensive, but if the servers are cookie-cutter installs then one security guy can cover a lot more of them. Remember you need both computer security as well as physical security for the data center, which don't come cheap. The Cloud dramatically lowers the cost to run a secure data center because you amortize the cost over many customers."
You owe me a keyboard and a clean part of pants.
I haven't laughed that hard since Reagan told Mondale he wouldn't hold his youth and inexperience against him as a campaign issue.
Seriously, how many articles have there been in the news in just the last year detailing the serial breaches of people's data from "secure" systems? 50? 100?
It is to laugh, so hard you fall out of your chair, roll around on the floor, and piss yourself.
"Network Security" has entered the lexicon of Great Oxymorons, right next to "military intelligence" "government help" and "jumbo shrimp".
Yes, you could probably run the country from a single data center in Kansas. It follows, drop a nuke on it and we no longer have a functioning country.
I think "the cloud" is a great thing - for other people. I prefer to stay local. Each time I see "the cloud", I think "someone else's server system".
As Neon notes, a single nuke dropped on a massive data farm takes out that data farm and "poof", you're screwed.
Fastly is a distributed system with servers situated around the world, and even IT is subject to outages. Cloudflare, Centurylink... there are multiple "cloud" systems out there (including AWS) that have occasional outages. And those outages are noticeable, especially when you depend solely on "the cloud".
The problem is, as has been said by others, "the internet is there - until it isn't." Relying ONLY on "the cloud" is a failure waiting to happen.
Depending solely on "the cloud" also means you're dependent on the operators of that system and their ideological bent. Ask Parler what happens when you depend solely on a cloud provider.
Build your in-house system large enough to take care of YOUR in-house folks. Install both physical and "good enough" network security on YOUR in-house systems. Shut off access to YOUR in-house systems from the outside world (yes, that means proxy servers to get out of your network and small-scale intrusion systems to prevent unauthorized entry). Set up a DMZ for external access.
Then, replicate your data to external cloud systems for external users. Rely on the cloud systems - and their security - to protect your internal systems. That way, if the cloud system hiccups or has an intrusion failure, your folks are mostly unaffected - and when the cloud returns, your system syncs changes up to the cloud.
Just my thoughts, but I'm sure BP will probably disagree.
You wouldn't even have to drop a nuke on Kansas City. An EMP air burst would do the job, and maybe more effectively. One of the selling points for Amazon Web early on was multiple site redundancy. I don't understand this sort of stuff all that well, but a physical takeover of one site might allow a person with the right skills to train wreck the other sites as well, couldn't it?
Your data center was yours. The cloud belongs to the tech oligarchs.
^^^ This, right there.
Your data center is keeping money in your wallet.
The cloud is handing it to the bank.
Anybody remember 1929? Anyone?? Beuller...??? Ferris Beuller...???
But 90% of Heinlein, and particularly TMIAHM, is classic sci-fi, and a great read.
That depends on how they are set up, but I suspect the answer is more than likely "Yes", especially if they have access to routing or billing information.
Don't forget the current videos of the 'robo-dogs' that have been created. Right out of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury where he called them 'mechanical hounds.'
Cloud computing provides a cost savings....that comes at a price. "Your data" is no longer yours. Once it exists on that cloud it gets copied and sent to any number of companies/agencies/countries for THEIR use. Count on it.
Cloud computing is not the panacea many imagine.
- In my experience it's usually opaque and difficult to customise if needed/desired, especially on the networking side
- It's a good deal more expensive than most expect, and is not cheaper than on-prem hardware if the on-prem equipment is amortized even a little bit longer than 3 years
- If your operation is outside of major metropolitan areas the latency of cloud-based compute really starts to play havoc with your endpoints (latency > 100ms sucks for lots of critical things)
- Workloads and data are not private in the cloud, and won't be even after homomorphic encryption technologies are mature (and just in the past week side channel weakness have been reported for this) if for no other reason than that traffic analysis is real
Regardless, this is, as noted, cyclical. I started my career on a mainframe helpdesk back in the '80s. Netware, WfWG 3.1 and token ring opened up the company I was at to PCs, along with SNA connections to that mainframe, then came the servers, and now we're seeing the move to the mainframe again - and in 20-30 years it will come back to smallholder control again, in some fashion.
Kurt
Yep. How often has Amazon come up with a new product or service shortly after a company moves to AWS? But it happens to be just enough different to avoid a majority of legal concerns.
I work in a very niche tech field now. One of my previous employers moved to AWS. Amazingly, AWS now offers a service so similar it took me about 4 hours to teach myself the AWS version.
The cloud is other peoples computers. And the cloud can be turned off anytime for any reason, just like bank accounts. Look what happened to Gab.
Aesop is right about security.
The computing world builds insecure hardware/software with shitty programming languages on crappy operating systems with built-in back-doors for themselves and their government buddies.
And the "cybersecurity" industry teaches more people how to be scriptkiddies than it does protecting infrastructure.
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