December 03, 2024
Kannan Subbiah
FCA | CISA | CGEIT | CCISO | GRC Consulting | Independent Director | Enterprise & Solution Architecture | Former Sr. VP & CTO of MF Utilities | BU Soft Tech | itTrident
Perhaps the term “DevOps” simply rolls off the tongue better than “OpDev,” but the argument could be made that since development comes first, operations will follow. But if we look under the hood, most shops actually do run “OpDev” pipelines, even though they do not recognize how that came about within the organization. ... Without a very strict CI/CD pipeline and (usually) many team members keeping infrastructure safe and cost efficient, operations is a Sisyphean task, and most importantly it’s slow. ... So we need a better way to handle infrastructure without turning the ops team into firefighters rather than cooperative team members. Correspondingly we want to enable the devs to build unencumbered by strict rule sets as well as preserve the agile nature and fast pace of development. ... More realistic and easily workable methods like Nitric abstract away the platform as a service SDKs from the codebase and replace the developers’ infra requirements with a library of tools that can be referenced exactly the same, no matter where the finalized code is deployed. The operations teams can easily maintain the needed infra patterns in a centralized location, reducing the need to solve issues after code PRs.?
In software development today, automated testing is already well established and accelerating. But new opportunities in QA will appear focused on what to test and how, he says, along with the skills necessary to identify security risks and other issues with code that’s created by AI. Jobs for experienced software test engineers won’t disappear overnight, but understanding what AI brings to the equation and making use of it could be key to stay relevant this area. “In order to survive and extend their career — whatever the job role — humans should master the art of leveraging AI as an assistant and embrace it,” Palaniappan says. ... “With the growth of cloud-native and serverless databases, employers are now more interested in your understanding of database architecture and data governance in cloud environments,” Lloyd-Townshend says. “To keep moving in the right direction in your career, it’s important to develop adaptive problem-solving skills and not just rely solely on specific technical expertise.” Hafez agrees activities around database management will be a casualty of technological evolution, especially ones focused on “repetitive activities such as backups, maintenance, and optimization.”
The fact that some companies are having success with generative AI, or Kubernetes, or whatever, doesn’t mean that you will. Our technology decisions should be driven by what we need, not necessarily by what we read. ... Google created Kubernetes to handle cluster orchestration at massive scale. It’s a microservices-based architecture, and its complexity is only worth it at scale. For many applications, it’s overkill because, let’s face it, most companies shouldn’t pretend to run their IT like Google. So why do so many keep using it even though it clearly is wrong for their needs? ... Andrej Karpathy, part of OpenAI’s founding team and previously director of AI at Tesla, notes that when you prompt an LLM with a question, “You’re not asking some magical AI. You’re asking a human data labeler,” one “whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs.” The machines are good at combing through lots of data to surface answers, but it’s perhaps just a more sophisticated spin on a search engine. ... That might be exactly what you need, but it also might not be. Rather than defaulting to “the answer is generative AI,” regardless of the question, we’d do well to better tune how and when we use generative AI.
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Just as AI chatbots have proven somewhat useful for surfacing information that’s hard to find through search engines, AI shopping agents have the potential to find products or deals that you might not otherwise have found on your own. In theory, these tools could save you hours when you need to book a cheap flight, or help you easily locate a good birthday present for your brother-in-law. ... If AI shopping agents really take off, it could mean fewer people going to online storefronts, where retailers have historically been able to upsell them or promote impulse purchases. It also means that advertisers may not get valuable information about shoppers, so they can be targeted with other products. For that reason, those very advertisers and retailers are unlikely to let AI agents disrupt their industries without a fight. That’s part of why companies like Rabbit and Anthropic are training AI agents to use the ordinary user interface of a website — that is, the bot would use the site just like you do, clicking and typing in a browser in a way that’s largely indistinguishable from a real person. That way, there’s no need to ask permission to use an online service through a back end — permission that could be rescinded if you’re hurting their business.
CEOs don’t trust their employees to work hard at home and fear they’re watching daytime TV in their pajamas while on the clock. They intuit office presence and the supervision of employees who appear to be working as a metric for productivity. They can feel personally more comfortable when they can walk around, interact with employees, and manage and supervise in person. Some CEOs also feel the need to justify their spending on office space, office equipment, and other costs associated with office work. Whatever the reasons, there’s a general disagreement between employees, who mostly want the option to work from home, and CEOs, who mostly want to require employees to come into the office. ... The remote work revolution will take a serious hit next year, both in government and business. Then, with new generations of workers and leaders gradually rising in the workforce in the coming decade, plus remote work-enabling technologies like AI (specifically agentic AI) and augmented reality growing in capability, remote work will make a slow, inevitable, and permanent comeback. In the meantime, 2025 will be a rough year for remote workers. Bu it also represents a huge opportunity for startups and even established companies to hire the very best employees who are turned away elsewhere because they insist on working remotely.
Japanese open-source developers are renowned for their skill, dedication, and meticulous focus on quality and detail. Their contributions have shaped global projects and produced standout achievements, such as the Ruby programming language, which exemplifies Japan's influence in open-source development. However, corporate policies in Japan have often been cautious regarding open source, particularly concerning licensing, lack of resources for future development, security worries, and other perceived limitations. While large Japanese corporations contribute significantly to open-source projects, they lag behind their U.S. and European counterparts in leveraging open-source as a core component of their products and services. This is now beginning to change. Open source is increasingly recognized as a way to accelerate development and expand global reach. Japanese companies are looking to open-source as a tool for increasing the speed of development, not just as a way to get projects up and running. ... It's true that when developing something, you should spend time-solving your own unique problems, and there is a tendency to use tools that can be combined with other existing tools to solve problems that can be solved.?