Sustain is a Verb: Code is Sustained or Not Sustained, not 'Sustainable'
(Note: This post is an excerpt from #182 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) So you, reader, will already understand that software is not “sustainable”. There’s no sustainability linter you can run over the code to highlight possible sustainability issues, no test suite you can run to check for sustainability regressions. Sustainability is not an inherent property of a piece of software. Same with a computing system, or a curated database, or.. Instead, these efforts are sustained, or not, by people or organizations who pay...
Continue...Gratis Offering, Risk, and our Post-ZIRP environment
(Note: This post is adapted from #170 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) It’s fantastic today that there’s so many free (gratis) tiers of service and packages of software, open source or otherwise, that we can use as the foundations for the computing, software, or data services we offer to our research communities. It really is! I feel that viscerally, because when I was coming of age in this community, proprietary and only barely interoperable OSes, compilers, libraries, resource managers, data platforms… were the norm,...
Continue...Buy and Lease, not Cloud vs On-Prem
(Note: This post is adapted from #130 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) I’d like us to move past the “cloud-vs-on-prem” debate. Right now, AWS or GCP will deliver their cloud hardware into your data centres to run there, if you want. Various commercial software can be subscribed to to manage infrastructure control. Hardware can be leased, bought, sold back. If your data centre is a co-lo, so the premises aren’t yours, is it really on premises? And… There’s a whole spectrum of options available...
Continue...Buy and Lease, not Cloud vs On-Prem
(Note: This post is adapted from #130 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) I’d like us to move past the “cloud-vs-on-prem” debate. Right now, AWS or GCP will deliver their cloud hardware into your data centres to run there, if you want. Various commercial software can be subscribed to to manage infrastructure control. Hardware can be leased, bought, sold back. If your data centre is a co-lo, so the premises aren’t yours, is it really on premises? And… There’s a whole spectrum of options available...
Continue...The Utility vs the Professional Services Firm
As research computing and data becomes more complex and diverse, we need more professional services firms and fewer utilities (Note: This post is adapted from #127 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) I get to talk with a lot of research computing and data teams - software, data, and systems. Sometimes in these conversations it’s pretty clear that some teams, or the team and their funder, or a team and I, are talking a bit past each other. And that’s usually because they or we...
Continue...What I've Learned from Looking at 1,500 Jobs Leading Research Computing Teams
Job numbers continue to grow; lots of data and product management jobs; IR groups at Universities becoming bigger employers (Note: This post is adapted from #111 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) A year and a half ago I posted my observations on the first 500 jobs posted to the job board - we’re getting close to 1,500 now, and it’s worth taking a look to see what if anything has changed in research computing team leadership and management jobs1. There are some trends that...
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