Critique of "Clown Computing" Orthodoxy by Helen Plews and Andy Farnell
THE sister site, Techrights, has mentioned Andy and Helen (Cyber|Show) covering systemic problems. For the uninitiated, Andy wrote for us a couple of years ago ("Why We Can't Teach Cybersecurity") and months ago he left his job to focus on better and greater things, including publications. "Our talk on cloud native cybersecurity," he told me, explains why the "Clown Computing" hype is a disaster. "Hope all is well with you and your crew," he told me yesterday. "Thanks so much you continue to notice and relay our cybershow things."
"On Thursday Helen and I were invited to an industry talk (corporate is the wrong word... many of these men and women are like us, engineers and coders caught up in the media business)."
There is already a page for it (link to video is at bottom).
To quote Andy:
We put on what might have been taken as "anti-cloud" stance by less aware listeners, but in fact we were boosting distributed and federated technologies, especially the idea of federated micro-cloud (sharing our compute resources via homomorphic compute workpackages etc), in contrast to the untrustworthy and irresilient big-cloud offerings (what do you call it, Clown Computing? I like that :)Some of the people got it! And it started a fight. We had the room split into bigtech apologists and "cloud rebels" who seemed to get excited that "cloud" could be a genuinely portable technology to appropriate and build into ones own business rather than the product of tech fiefdoms as Yanis Varoufakis put it.
Some of the discussion touched on environmental issues too, so we could have gotten into a debate about "green cloud", but we steered it away. We ended up on general issues of civic cybersecurity and free software towards the end, so it gets more interesting as it goes.
The very concept of "Clown Computing" is a disaster; it's just a fancy and rather misleading buzzword/catchphrase for outsourcing (which begets plenty of severe issues). █