[talk] Holidaze, AWS, and astounding "clock drift outage"

[Pete Wright]

On 01/03/2018 00:09, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> After weeks of nonsense (and boring long stories),
>
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2017, at 3:39 PM, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> A bit OT from the pit of internet hell, but perhaps of interest to folks
>> here: This weekend AWS has been doling out a disruption of service of
>> the worst kind, clock skew insanity.  And when I say insanity, I mean
>> true madness.
> Updates, perhaps of interest in several categories,
>
> Through continued holiday NTP/hardware adventure, we were told we were casualties of a Xen exploit to be publicly announced Thursday:
> https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/
>
> As of today, Intel appears to be prepping to get in the mix, with issues apparently *quite* related,
> https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7nl8r0/intel_bug_incoming/
> http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-mysterious-case-of-the-linux-page-table
>
> Thursday my Ops teammates and I will certainly be popping popcorn to watch this show.
>
> --
> When we all knew how stupid this technical approach was years ago, why has the cloud taken the shape it has?
> https://youtu.be/z7LsKtHXAmo?t=2545
>
> I'm looking forward to the day the current favella of what we currently call "the cloud" has burned to the ground.  And, I hope not completely burned- so we can look upon it's ashes for centuries and know how *not* to build things.

it's funny - this whole thing is just another chapter in my rant that 
just like in the natural world a heterogeneous environment is a sign of 
a healthy ecosystem.  sure, it may take more effort and complexity to 
support a heterogeneous environment - but it does increase your ability 
to survive changes outside of your control.

the fact that intel has something like %90 market share of CPU's was 
bound to have consequences, much like the fact that lord knows how many 
start-ups are solely dependent upon AWS :/

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA