> <i>The notion that something needs to remain on-premise is really an Old World way of thinking and feels more like someone wanting control as opposed to there being a valid argument.</i><p>No, it's the business continuity way of thinking. Outsourcing commodities -- such as servers, virtual or otherwise -- is one thing.<p>Outsourcing your core operational tools, software, <i>and all your data</i> is another matter entirely. Preferring SaaS at a company large enough to afford on-premise solutions is just nonsensical, and I expect it'll either blow up in his face, or just create a never-ending tax on end users who are constantly dealing with a mishmash of vendors, accounts, disappearing services, broken software, and instability.<p>At scale, stability and continuity is worth more than the opex/capex costs of internal IT.
The jargon and acronyms in this interview are intense. It's pretty clearly an industry interview so it's my fault that I don't know the phrases, but I'm a little surprised by how impenetrable it is to me (a software engineer who has worked in large corp environments).<p>Anyway care to expand on some of the less Googleable acronyms?<p>- MDM/MAM<p>- NAC<p>- EDW (synonymous with ETL?)
It'd be great if Netflix (or some other company) manages to do some heavy lifting in creating a viable, modern, certificate-based authentication and authorization stack, that's easier to deploy. Essentially an upgraded take on kerberos (move off shared secrets, perhaps), AFS (I still don't know what a viable way forward for secure, distributed, locally cacheable network filesystem is -- maybe DAV+TLS+regular caching?). I suppose LDAP might be fine as a user/principal/authorization database, but some distribution that uses internal CA and demands TLS as default would be a good start.<p>The last "innovation" I'm aware of in this area, is skolelinux/edulinux work with packaging samba/ldap/kerberos/lts in a easy(ier) to manage package for Debian:<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Architecture" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Archi...</a>
I thought the 2014 Technology Roadmap [1] was an interesting read. For an organization as "young" as Netflix, I was surprised by the technology debts that they've accumulated and the aggressive tone that they've set to transition.<p>I think it's amazing the decisions that get made with explosive growth/hiring that end-up on roadmaps that read similarly to organizations that have been around much longer.<p>There's no criticism here. I think Netflix is an amazing company and it is the this sort of strategic vision (and the openess of both it and the organization overall) that reminds me that we're all on this rocky ship together and it's amazing that any of it works sometimes.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/mdkail/it-ops-2014-technology-roadmap" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/mdkail/it-ops-2014-technology-road...</a>
One thing that stuck out to me:<p>> We are implementing “certificate-based authentication” instead of the standard username/password auth against Active Directory.<p>I wish we were all doing this. How long is it going to take to get a usable certificate-based client/user authentication mechanism on the web?<p>edit: Also see e12e's comment.
TLDR: The approach we take for IT works (for us at this point in time in the scope defined as IT by me and/or our internal customers).<p>Netflix talks generally can be fascinating and inspiring. However, when considering IT it's also important to consider the charter and challenges of Netflix IT.<p>i.e. it's no more valid or invalid that the talks of how IT is delivered in so-called build vs. broker models in other companies in other industries <a href="http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-07-05/" rel="nofollow">http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-07-05/</a>
Reading the slides make me think this is full of nothing :|
How is 802.11ac speed making things "more cloud"? Because you get slightly more bandwidth -maybe- if you have a new laptop and also you dont have everyone using it?
I don't get it.<p>Requiring VPN everywhere, how is that cloudy?<p>Finally, using stuff like AWS is nice, but unless they have a specific contract (which they may since they advertise them a lot), its a LOT more expensive when you start having a lot of processing (ie big companies like netflix)
I really wanted to share this article with my friends, but it was so filled with buzzwords that even my dev friends wouldn't ascertain much.<p>Keep in mind I'm an idiot, and I have idiot friends.