Tag: ai

cloud agnost manifesto

by jepheverett, posted in Computers and Internet

If the CNCF are the Sith, we are the Jedi.

OK, maybe that’s not the greatest reference, I’m not saying enterprise software is straight up evil, but let’s run with it a bit and see where it goes. This is an opinion piece, obviously inspired by the devops manifesto. I’m trying to make it a fun read, and set some context, more than I’m trying to be technically correct.


As enterprise software consumed the world, ever since Adobe revolutionized P&L for software firms by going all in on making customers rent not buy, the center of gravity was shifted towards cloud hosted and SaaS solutions. After all, since it’s OpEx instead of CapEx, the budget is easier to approve, and there are all these great benefits to not running things yourself.

Great benefits like not owning your data, having it leaked on your behalf, not controlling your own destiny when it comes to meeting SLO’s, not having any control over if or when new features are released to your environment, oh and my personal favorites, not knowing when large swaths of the internet will fail due to centrailized points of failure, and everything you want is another bill. Just ask any one who has ever had to think about the AWS bill of a unicorn or two, the egress costs alone force you into asking vendors to they support AWS private link at some point, and evaluating it right up there with other required features.

While this has been great for P&L for a lot of companies, it actually kinda sucks from basically every operational perspective.

Under the surface, academia has largely shunned the enterprise software revolution. In this economy, nobody can afford all that, and even in the age of ZIRP, and when AWS was still subsidizing it’s growth to buy marketshare, if you wanted truly high performance compute (ahem, CERN and OpenStack), you didn’t go to AWS, you racked and stacked hardware suited for use. AFAIK and can research, the compute under one of the worlds most advanced k8s clusters is still OpenStack, and at least the storage at CERN is still on ceph/OpenStack.

I don’t actually care for the blockchain/crypto space much based on my limited exposure to it, but it’s worth mentioning in the context of resistance to the subscription based cloud hosted and SaaS serviced normal operating model, and trying to resist centralization, at least in theory.

I’m not saying that if you’re trying to build Netflix or Uber or Doordash or your webstore or whatever app that operates at millions of users scale, CNCF is wrong. If you’re operating an app at scale, and building a single user experience which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute or hour to have down, absolutely build you hybrid cloud EK8S platform and do all your scrum ceremonies and ship your helm charts with maximum release velocity. I’m not saying that’s the wrong approach, for that use case. BUT THAT IS NOT EVERYONE. It’s not even the majority of use cases, and it doesn’t have to become the future where it is.

There are the use cases of running a business, which probably at least needs humans to agree to pay it something, and may even still require humans to do work. Disgusting meatbags who have to be trained and learn and sleep and make mistakes and forget things. So gross, those little human dependencies are, to the enterprise software SAFe 6 operational model. At least there’s the pagerduty abstracton layer to wake those gross meatbags up when they have to fix things, or to find another when one won’t wake up or is hit by a school bus.

Neither of those use cases, actually running a business, or being a human, continue to be best served by the enterprise software subscription models. These use cases have a lot of user stories, like having some way to store knowledge, train people (or your MCP agents), and having some way to riff on or share something with your internal team, without needing to wrestle with IT for access to an account to provision a resource checked by a security policy to OMG I just wanna test this new tool and now that workstations are all locked down, I can’t locally, so I think I’ll just quiet quit.

Photos is perhaps the best use case for something that doesn’t fit as well into the modern SaaS/cloud model. I just wanna be able to put my pictures somewhere, and not have them degrade faster than a 70’s polarioid. No, seriously, my 20’s were on myspace. Maybe they are still there, maybe they aren’t, but they might as well be gone. At least photobucket has warned me daily for months that it’s going to delete things, or is that phishing? I don’t even remember putting anything there.

Perhaps I shouldn’t date myself, but I have more memorabilia from high school, before the digital age, than I do remnants of my life during the early digital age. I had an external hard drive and the computer I had most of my stuff on stolen out of a storage unit while I was moving. There’s no question that having some sort of strategy around offsite replication is critical, but who says we have to be cloud native for everything? Why can’t the cloud be the offsite backup, the cold storage, and the DR/failover solution, instead of the default for everything?

Do I want to pay Adobe or Apple or Google or Microsoft or few hundred bucks a year for cloud storage, just to backup photos? Can I get away with just one, if I have photos from both a phone and traditional cameras? Do I prefer to trust that facebook won’t go the way of myspace, and let them mine my metadata so they can market to me more effectively, and worry about my privacy settings and audience?

Or do I maybe just want to buy a consumer NAS for about the same price as 2-3 years subscription, and find a friend or two who I can setup offsite backup routines with, optionally archiving some stuff to a cloud provider if it’s worth it, and setup plex or immich on that nas, to share with exactly who I want? I won’t question consumer behavior, because these alternatives to self host things weren’t always there. Surely and steadily, though, we find more and more self-hosted alternatives to subscription based cloud and saas services, and with radically improved and simplified tools to host things locally, manage them with infrastructure as code, and follow all the other modern best practices. All while retaining data ownership, having the ability to share photo data between your darktable container and wordpress container, so you don’t need a bunch of egress fees or to replicate data across platforms, having a platform I can play around with whatever flavor of the month, mining some coin, hosting my own open source LLM’s and MCP on, building skills and knowledge critical to operating at scale, etc.

So going back to the original analogy, maybe not such a bad fit with the Sith and Jedi? Do we want giant monolithic solutions designed to maximize P&L, or do we want to control our own destiny and use the same hosting strategy we do to operate and analyze the data from the most complex tools humanity has ever created that humanity as a collective uses to understand the fundamental nature of reality?

After all, if you own the hardware, at least you’ll know if or when your gpus are melting, and be in control of how much to spend, and if/when to spend it, instead of being called in to explain why your monthly budget is off plan again.

A CACF would focus on the majority of computing use cases that aren’t operating some app that’s changing the world through the sheer will of it’s ego. It would focus on projects that had the prospect to meaningfully improve on the ability to locally store or process large amounts of data, or on the ability to simply, securely, and reliably share specific types of data, across the myriad of network environments and presence or lack of available namespaces. It would focus not on building apps that can sale to serve serve millions or billions of humans, but on building apps that actually serve most humans in more real scenarios day to day, without making those humans the product by scraping their data when they aren’t paying.

Now that we have robust tooling for handling IP dynamism, automatically creating DNS records for SSL validation, etc, we have the tools to control our own destiny. What we don’t have, is a great way of knowing which of these open source projects are the most trustworthy, or sets of defaults that are designed to work together. It seems like the forces of time already pushing the pendulum back towards data ownership. GDPR was a watershed moment in terms of pushing back against allowing corporations to just pile everyone’s data into one big juicy honeypot. A decade plus on, we’re ready for a new default operating model for most businesses and humans, one that preserves data ownership, and shifts the conversation away from outright dependence, to thoughtful use, of subscription and cloud based offerings.

Backstory and consulting again

by jepheverett, posted in Computers and Internet

Going beyond a resume, if you want to understand me as a person, understand that I *love* when people tell me something can’t be done (especially if they are willing to pay to be proven wrong), and I’ve made an effort over decades to work on my weak points.

My childhood exposed me to a wide variety of schools, living environments, and conflicts that couldn’t be avoided, so I learned to lean into a challenge when it was unavoidable, and be adept in to avoiding unnecessary conflict.

In high school I got into competitive speech and debate, winning some minor awards, and most importantly becoming confident in front of a room or presenting in general. Coming out of high school, my worst % placement on any subject on the ACT was in the 79th percentile, with most subjects in the 90s, and a 95th percentile composite rank. I had jobs, the loss of a parent, girlfriends, extracurriculars, and cars, lots besides school going on. I wasn’t purely an academic, but by that age enough work ethic had been instilled in me to expect to be at least highly functional in every area, and to be the best or near the best in most areas. I’m a bit of a perfectionist to be sure, I also know that you can do anything but you can’t do everything, and good isn’t necessarily the enemy of perfect.

While I did go to college (3 in fact, trying to find the right fit in terms of expenses and a worthwhile educational experience), I found it at best opulent (College of Idaho), and at worst stifling (BSU), and always a financial burden (WSU, all). I had a 3.something GPA but didn’t graduate due to the loans stacking up, and job I already had. Plus, Will Hunting is my spirit animal, and a wise man once said: “I hear and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Through my 20’s, my work was largely sales focused. Around age 25, I started to refocus on tech since it was opportune at the time, and I had some aptitude there. My first big break came when I found a contract retail rep job with Microsoft on craigslist. I was able to parlay that 1 year contract into a permanent “blue badge” role with Microsoft, and take advantage of a bunch of free trainings as a result.

Equipped with some certifications, I struck out on my own as a freelance tech consultant. I was lucky enough to find a couple of mentors in the business community, and work at a really unique very early stage bootstrapped hardware startup, and at a company that makes hospitality POS software for some large properties and clients.

By 30 I was well established in the IT space. In a couple of progressive roles at Tableau, over around 6 years, I grew from being a highly skilled IT technician, to a true DevOps/SRE engineer, and eventually seeing the Salesforce acquisition from the inside. My solid decade of career progression was interrupted by a foray into the nascent blockchain/crypto/web3 space, which I find fascinating and promising on some technical levels, but to say that overall ecosystem left a sour taste in my mouth would put it kindly.

After that interruption in my career progression and adjusting for where I am in life, I decided to take some time off, and enjoyed a ~18 month career break. Now I find myself in a place where I’m back to having full time work. I’m not trying to quit my day job, I enjoy it and want to keep it as a primary source of income, but on the other side of a layoff, I’m starting to look for the right contract engagements to take on the side.

At this stage of my technical career, I have a comprehensive understanding not just of modern service delivery and operational security, but of the software development and operational lifecycles. This means for most organizations and most technical use cases, I’m coming in with highly refined skillsets and knowledge of best practices and tooling that will be transformational for the right customers.

I have managed websites and software development processes and tooling at some of the “coolest” and most reputable tech organizations in the PNW and world, have advanced skills in terms of search optimization strategy and tooling. I can be a game changer for small and medium brands, companies, and property owners seeking to build refined, measurable, and profitable marketing funnels.

I’ve also helped large businesses with things like digital transformation and tools rationalization projects, major infrastructure migrations, and CI/CD/IaC standardization efforts. I can offer insights into gaps in tooling, security posture, and process opportunities, pinch hit as an engineer when necessary, and help organizations build teams that don’t need pinch hitters.

Every organization has weak points. I will find yours, and help make them strengths.