Government IT Spend

The way that governments are run they'll be a huge amount of duplication and waste in this lot. Situation is even worse when you consider that historically it's mostly proprietary software with n year support contracts for stuff that's rarely used (but hits the headlines when it is). Not at all surprising.

The future for government IT is open-source and cloud based.

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An Observation

Much has changed in the past few years, hell, much has changed in the past few weeks, but that’s another story... and I’ve found a little time on my hands in which to tidy things up. The world of non-functionals has never been so important and yet remains irritatingly ignored by so many - in particular by product owners who seem to think NFRs are nothing more than a tech concern. So if your fancy new product collapses when you get get too many users, is that ok? It’s fair that the engineering team should be asking “how many users are we going to get?”, or “how many failures can we tolerate?” but the only person who can really answer those questions is the product owner. The dumb answer to these sort of question is “lots!”, or “none!” because at that point you’ve given carte-blanche to the engineering team to over engineer... and that most likely means it’ll take a hell of a lot longer to deliver and/or cost a hell of a lot more to run. The dumb answer is also “only a couple” and “

Inter-microservice Integrity

A central issue in a microservices environment is how to maintain transactional integrity between services. The scenario is fairly simple. Service A performs some operation which persists data and at the same time raises an event or notifies service B of this action. There's a couple of failure scenarios that raise a problem. Firstly, service B could be unavailable. Does service A rollback or unpick the transaction? What if it's already been committed in A? Do you notify the service consumer of a failure and trigger what could be a cascading failure across the entire service network? Or do you accept long term inconsistency between A & B? Secondly, if service B is available but you don't commit in service A before raising the event then you've told B about something that's not committed... What happens if you then try to commit in A and find you can't? Do you now need to have compensating transactions to tell service B "oops, ignore that previous messag

Equifax Data Breach Due to Failure to Install Patches

"the Equifax data compromise was due to their failure to install the security updates provided in a timely manner." Source: MEDIA ALERT: The Apache Software Foundation Confirms Equifax Data Breach Due to Failure to Install Patches Provided for Apache® Struts™ Exploit : The Apache Software Foundation Blog As simple as that apparently. Keep up to date with patching.

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