[talk] "death of IT"

[Jim Thompson]

>> On Mar 28, 2020, at 10:17 PM, George Rosamond <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 3/28/20 11:14 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>>>> On Mar 28, 2020, at 9:29 PM, George Rosamond <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
>>> A novel idea... if you forget that behind the SASE network is a bunch of
>>> servers.  Deskilling has been going on without question, that's
>>> undeniable....
>>> https://www.cringely.com/2020/03/25/2020-brings-the-death-of-it/
>> 
>> "[A] new fact has now become painfully clear to me: you don't say you have the Ph.D. unless you really have the Ph.D." — Mark Stephens (as Robert X. Cringley.  Cringley is a pen named used by 4-5 authors over the years.)
>> 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely
> 
> Sort of secondary to the point...

My point is that you’re citing an article written by a person (Mark Stephens), who has been disproven so many times that we’ve lost count. 

He might as well be a fiction writer. 

He even falsely claimed to have a PhD from Stanford, until Stanford called him out. 

So why put any stock in what he says about IT, especially when his lede is that you can get a keyboard from Amazon?

Because he’s promoting SASE, which Gartner is (also) pimping?   That boat won’t float.  SASE is cloud-focused. It’s just another iteration on SD-WAN, and SD-WAN was only a reaction to MPLS circuits terminating at the data center, but the apps moving to public cloud. 

We had a call with Gartner.  The pinhead on the call must have said “L7 forwarding” 30 times.   He seriously thinks the world will move to making routing decisions on the basis of payload.  It was insanely stupid. 

L7 forwarding actually makes a certain amount of sense if (and only if) everything is a web app, *and* you’re a load balancer so you can, for example, make a decision to forward a given URL to that set of servers over there (or make the decision on any other (set of) layer 7 attribute(s) such as the detected browser type). 

But TLS makes that increasingly difficult, and nearly every web app has, or will soon have, TLS. Load balancers will perform TLS termination, but we were talking about “forwarding”, remember?

So, in the end, you have a bullsh*t artist (Stephens, writing under the Cringley pennant), spouting bullsh*t about “the end of IT”, because Amazon can provide the keyboards and Cisco will sell you a new WAN. 

Got it.