Saturday, October 29, 2016

Cape Cod: Fall of 2016

Nauset Beach, Cape Cod

It’s been a few years—partly because I’ve tended to be doing a lot of October travel of late—but the stars aligned again for a Cape Cod trip this fall. We’ve pretty much settled on early October for this trip when we do it. The summer mobs are gone but the Cape is still mostly open for business and the weather is typically still nice.

We tend to stay in Eastham or Wellfleet on the lower Cape (i.e. further out on the Cape). This gets you out to where the interesting beaches and other outdoor attractions are, is easily accessible to Provincetown, but is removed from the general craziness and higher prices of P’town. Of course, if you’d rather ditch your car and hang out, P’town would be the better choice. We’ve stayed at various motels near the bike path (Cape Cod Rail Trail), though I didn’t get onto my inline skates this time. The Even'tide in Wellfleet has proven to be a good choice. I’ve also stayed at the Town Crier in Eastham (next to Arnold’s, a well-known “clam shack” in the area). There are a fair number of choices along the main drag (Route 6).

Restaurants

Upscale casual, but reasonably priced, is the Wicked Oyster in Wellfleet, near but not on the harbor. This is the second time I’ve eaten there and it’s probably been the best meal I had on both trips. This year I had a lovely pan seared cod over a light cream broth with littlenecks, sunchokes, leeks and bacon. My dinner companion had seared scallops over a sweet pea, artichoke and goat cheese risotto, topped with pea tendrils. Both were delicious—fresh and perfectly cooked. My clam chowder starter was also excellent; I’d have been tempted by raw Wellfleet oysters but, alas, the beds were temporarily closed due to a norovirus outbreak. The one comment I would add is that, current oyster issues aside, the Wicked Oyster is light on oyster dishes given its name and location. So don’t go in with your heart set on a bunch of oyster eating options.

Wellfleet, Cape Cod

The Bookstore and Restaurant is on the harbor—although the early October weather was such that it was a bit chilly to sit outside and fully absorb the view. I decided to have a couple of generously sized appetizers: a dozen raw littlenecks followed by an Oyster stew. My friend started with the Oysters Rockefeller followed by the Cranberry-walnut crusted baked cod. It was all good—even if Antoine’s in New Orleans has forever spoiled me for anyone else’s Oysters Rockefeller. A couple of their seafood stews looked very inviting as well. I just didn’t have the appetite that night for what looked like very generous portions.

Finally, on our P’town day, we ate at Ross’ Grill, which was fine. The views of the harbor were great and the food was above average. The calamari appetizer had a nice light batter that didn’t get in the way of enjoying the thick calamari slices. The soy-ginger sauce was sort of thin but an improvement over the marinara/cocktail sauce one often gets. And I enjoyed the roast duck special with a nice berry sauce. My dinner companion enjoyed her seafood stew less though, by her own admission, it just wasn’t really what she expected. (She had in mind one of the creamier stews at the Bookstore rather than a fairly traditional Portuguese Fish Stew with lots of tomato and a thin broth.) It probably didn’t help that our waiter was a bit perfunctory and didn’t volunteer a whole lot of information in response to questions. 

Activities

As an aside, I’ll note that we ran into something this time that was unfamiliar from pervious visits. The tide was high around mid-day and these were astronomically higher tides. As a result, for one of hikes, we had to shift our timeline and the other was just challenging. Water shoes might have helped in one case but these are big tides on often very gently-sloping sands.

The following are a few favorite places, both from this trip and prior ones.

Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary - Mass Audubon. This is one of Mass Audubon’s better sanctuaries. (I also recommend Ipswich and Wachusett Meadows.) It’s 937 acres with 5 miles of trails. A boardwalk brings you out to the ocean. It even has one or two prickly pear cactus plants, believe it or not!

Great Head hill, Cape Cod

Great Island in Wellfleet is one of the longer hikes on the Cape. It’s eight miles or so depending upon the route you take and how far you go (and how far the tide lets you go). There are a couple of monuments on the island, an old tavern site (though in typical New England manner there’s not much left to see other than a cellar hole), shore birds, and (mostly) beach walking. Don’t get stuck out at Jeremy Point by the high tide but it’s also difficult to even get out to the tavern site at least an hour or so either side of high tide.

Wood End and (optionally) Long Point Lighthouses from Pilgrims First Landing Park in Provincetown. There’s some limited free and unmetered parking at the small rotary. Otherwise you’ll need to head toward the town and find a parking lot.  A long breakwater composed of granite blocks connects the small park to the spit of land with the lighthouses. Walking over the breakwater is mostly straightforward but a few sections get covered at high tide and others get a bit rough (i.e. I wouldn’t personally try it in sandals). The breakwater takes you to near Wood End Light. You can extend the hike by walking over to Long Point Light.

Race Point. Cape Cod, MA

Another hike, which I didn’t do this year, is Race Point Beach and Race Point Light. (Now privately owned. Tours are sometimes offered and the keeper’s house is available for rent.) I don’t really remember the details of hiking it—though I do remember the lighthouse and beach, but this says it’s about 8 miles.

The Marconi Wireless Station Site is in Wellfleet. Not many original artifacts remain but it’s worth a visit even if some of the interpretive displays were removed a few years ago and the main shelter removed because it was going to eventually fall off the cliff. Also nearby are Marconi Beach and the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail, a particularly nice excursion for a rainy day or if you just want a short walk before you drive home. 

Coast Guard Beach in Eastham also comes recommended. A shuttle runs there through Labor Day. However, be aware that after the shuttle stops running, there is a very limited parking area next to the old Coast Guard Station and no other options remotely close. So, in the somewhat off-season, it can be difficult to park there. 

Also nearby are Nauset Light and the Three Sisters, older lighthouses from the area that have been reunited away from the ocean. 

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Open source and OpenShift in government with Red Hat's David Egts

Red Hat's Chief Technologist for the North American public sector, David Egts, sat down with me to discuss some of the trends he's seeing in the public sector. In addition to being a podcaster himself (The Dave and Gunnar Show), David has years of experience working with government and related public sector organizations at all levels. In this show, he shares some of the trends he's been seeing around open source (such as the White House open source policy), the collaboration around OpenSCAP, how OpenShift is being used to manage containers, and the upcoming Red Hat Government Symposium in Washington DC.

Show notes:



MP3 audio (18:01)
OGG audio (18:01)

[Transcript]

Gordon Haff: Today I'm joined by David Egts who's the Chief Technologist for the North American Public Sector at Red Hat. He's going to have some great insights to share with us about how government, at various levels, is adopting cloud and container technology.
Welcome, David.
David Egts:  Hey, Gordon. Glad to be here. A big fan of the show, so it's great to finally be on it after all the episodes I've listened to. Thanks for having me.
Gordon:  I should mention at this point, and we'll have a link in the show notes, that David is the co‑host with Gunnar Hellekson of his own podcast. Tell us a little bit about your podcast.
David:  It's "The Dave and Gunner Show." If people go to dgshow.org you could hear the podcast where I interview a bunch of people in the open source community, people at Red Hat.
A lot of the time Gunnar and I will just get on and we'll just talk about the tech news of the day, and parenting, and all kind of other fun things like that. I do have to admit, though, the podcast wouldn't exist if it wasn't for yours being the inspiration to get things going, so thank you for all the work you've done.
Gordon:  Thanks, David. We're going to talk about a number of cloud, and government, and policy things on this show, but let's start talking about something specific. Namely, that's container adoption in the government, specifically around Red Hat OpenShift.
David: In Public Sector, OpenShift interest taking off like crazy. I think the reason for it is that the folks in government that I've been talking to, when we talk about having a container strategy, they know they want to have one, but they often don't have the time or the resources to be able to roll their own container platform themselves.
They see all of this really hot innovation coming out of open source communities and all this hot software coming out of Silicon Valley from a lot of start‑ups. Then they see products like OpenShift Container Platform, which builds upon things like docker, builds on Kubernetes, and they see that as an integrated solution. They really are flocking to embrace it.
They're a bunch of customer success stories that we have that we can talk about that are really fun.
Gordon:  Let's get to those in a second. I did want to just make one point to your point about essentially making container adoption easy. This really is not just a government type of thing. We see this at a lot of customers who start out, "Whoa, if Google can do it themselves, we can do it ourselves, too." They go through an iteration and find this isn't really that easy to do.
David:  No, absolutely. Then also you end up building this snowflake that you can't put an ad in the paper and hire somebody to do this, or send them somewhere for training. You incur all this technical debt. Whereas, if you have an engineered solution that you can get training for or you could hire somebody for, it's really, really powerful.
A lot of people really focus on the mission of what they're working on.
Gordon:  Tell us some specific examples that you've been working on and that you can talk about there, out in the field.
David:  Yeah, one of my favorite ones. I actually did a podcast on The Dave and Gunner Show. We interviewed the Carolina CloudApps folks, the team at University of North Carolina. They're providing OpenShift as a service to all of the students, and faculty, and researchers at UNC.
It's really neat to see a bunch of the things that they're doing with, as far as container densities that they're getting. They're running over a hundred apps per container host. Where, if you think about that in the traditional virtualization base, getting like a 10:1 ratio of virtualized systems per hypervisor was great, but to get 100:1 is just amazing.
Then there are other things, too, as far as the range of people that they have to work with where it's like 18‑year‑old students that are just brand new freshmen to people approaching their retirement years in the faculty.
Being able to come up with documentation, and building a community, and getting people to adopt the software in a very easy way was a really neat challenge for them, which I thought was pretty amazing. Then the last thing that I thought was really neat was the whole thing.
For any sort of IT organization, you need to be very, very compelling or risk being replaced by Shadow IT by providing something like a container platform, like Carolina CloudApps does.
That allows them to be really relevant and deliver a lot of value to the students, and faculty, and the researchers to prevent them from even considering going with something from a third party or spinning up something in your dorm room.
Gordon:  What are some of the lessons that you would say that you've learned, that Red Hat's learned, that the customers have learned as we've gone through this process of what's rather a new set of technologies?
David:  I think security is one of the big things that I've found out. Just because people are moving into containers and you're sticking everything into a container, the security burden shifts from being mostly the responsibility of the operations team to being a shared responsibility between the development and the operations team.
You can't just flip a container over the wall, hand it to ops, and then have it go into production. It can't be these black box containers you give over. You need to move some of that security discipline over to the development side, so in the CICD processes the same way that you do unit tests to make sure that your code behaves properly.
You also want to do security tests as part of your unit test workloads.
Gordon:  As I've been writing about security over the last maybe six months or so ‑‑ and I've been doing a fair bit about it ‑‑ one of the things that's really struck me is the evolution in thinking about security.
I think we kind of came from a point where, on the one hand, you had people that were like, "Oh, clouds are insecure. We can't use clouds." Then, on the other hand, people would be like, "Oh. Well, we'll just use a public cloud provider, and we don't need to worry about security any longer."
You had these kind of extreme viewpoints, and I think it's actually good that ‑‑ from talking to people and reading things, and working through these deployments ‑‑ most people, I won't say everyone ‑‑ but most people seem to be thinking about security more intelligently and more thoughtfully.
David:  Yeah, and it's also one of the things that I see, too, is that in the past, in the Federal government, you would have maybe annual audits or these periodic audits where, "We're gonna see if we've drifted from our security baseline."
The reality is that your adversaries, they're not going to attack you once a year. They're attacking you multiple times a day. Being able to automate your scanning, and being able to make sure that you haven't drifted from your security baseline, and being able to rapidly snap back into it is really, really powerful.
That's where tools like the atomic scan tools that we've integrated into our OpenShift are really compelling where we work with partners like Black Duck and Sonatype, even SCAP where we can do just DISA STIG for containers and make sure that they're locked down properly. It's really, really exciting work.
Gordon:  You've mentioned automation. Let's talk a little bit more about automation because, from what I've been seeing, automation is really the heart of how a lot of these organizations are evolving. They're really starting to think about, "What can I automate next? What's the next low‑hanging fruit that I can basically...don't have to worry about any longer?"
David:  Yeah, and that's where, what is it, people spend 80 percent of their budgets on keeping the lights on and that leaves 20 percent for innovation. But, there's a lot of time when you have these patch‑Tuesdays, and everybody's on this patching hamster wheel. It's like they spend all month patching and, before you know it, it's patch‑Tuesday again.
You're just doing this over, and over, and over again, and there's absolutely no time for doing any sort of innovation at all. That's where, if you can, automate things like security, automate your build processes. Whenever things can be automated, they should be automated.
There's an article that I wrote where I actually saw an interview that was done with Terry Halvorsen, who's the CIO of the DoD. He was giving a press interview, saying that the number one driver for data center consolidation in the DoD is labor costs and that, basically, automation is the key to help drive down those labor costs and if anything that can be automated should be automated.
That really underscores that point of you really need to be able to automate as much as possible if you want to do any sort of innovation.
Gordon:  That's really just the cost side of things. In areas like security, for example, you can really increase the quality because not only is it taking you less work to do these manual repeated tasks, but if it's automated you can be pretty sure that it's going to happen the same way the hundredth time that it happens the first time. You're not going to make a mistake in there that creates a vulnerability for an attack.
David:  Yeah, and your checks could be a lot more robust and a lot richer, too. If I had a human that is locking down a system, there's only so many checks that that human can do per hour.
But, if I can make it machine readable, where I'm using tools like SCAP or I'm using tools like Ansible that can just go through, and I can have a lot more rules and a lot more checks and have this defense in depth.
Gordon:  Let's switch gears a little bit here to talk about policy. One of the really big changes in the last few years has been the fact that government, at multiple levels, is really starting to think about open source systematically and, in some ways, perhaps embracing it more systematically than many private organizations.
David:  It'll be 10 years for me in February, when I joined Red Hat. I remember 10 years ago I would go into meetings and people were wondering if this whole open source thing's going to take off to now, to the point where, back in the day, open source was the insurgent, now it's the incumbent, where people in the government are huge consumers of open source.
We're proud to say that every tactical vehicle in the US Army is running at least one piece of open source software from Red Hat. You can go down the line with every agency. All 50 states are running Red Hat products or using open source technologies in a commercially supported way. I think that the pendulum is even swinging further from being a consumer to being a contributor and a collaborator.
We've done a lot of work as part of the open source community with the SCAP Security Guide where we've partnered with NSA, and DISA, and NIST, and all kind of other integrators, and government agencies, and folks from academia to do security baselines in an open source way. That has been very exciting to be able to come out with security baselines a lot faster than doing it yourself.
Also, the other thing that I'm seeing, too, is that the White House just released the OMB open source policy guidance where they talk about all of the custom‑written code and that the government pays for. First off, it should be reusable by all of the agencies.
They also have the same goal over the next three years to open source 20 percent of that code and then do an analysis to see if this is working out well and all that. It was really neat to see the evolution of the draft policy come out in the final policy where all of that glueware that the government is paying government employees or integrators to implement.
They really want to reuse that as much as possible instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again. To me, that's really exciting.
Gordon:  Yeah, and, of course, a lot of the new policies even go beyond open source in terms of having open data, in terms of research that's paid for with taxpayer money, should be publicly available and so forth. Obviously, there's still a lot of work that needs to go into many of those areas, but it's certainly trending in a good direction.
David:  No, absolutely. I'm really excited by it.
Gordon:  If somebody wants to learn more about what Red Hat's doing in government, what the government itself is doing in open source, how they can get involved, what's one or two good next steps they can take.
David:  I think one of the things that they should do is check out the Red Hat Government Symposium. If people go to redhatgov.com, that's a short link to get to the registration site for that. That's our annual even that we have every year in DC. This year it is on November 2nd at the Ritz‑Carlton in Pentagon City.
This is going to be really exciting where, if you think about it, the following week is the presidential election. We have the open source policy that came out. There's going to be a lot of people wondering what's going to happen over the next 12 months and how policies that are in place now will evolve over time.
It's going to be a great opportunity to network with folks where we're going to have Mike Hermus, who's the CTO of Department of Homeland Security, is going to give a keynote. We're going to have a lot of executives from Red Hat giving keynotes, like Tim Yeaton and Ashesh Badani. I'm really excited about the events that are coming out. Please, come check that out.
Gordon:  That's great, Dave. I just find it so interesting. The government often gets this reputation for being kind of a decade behind everyone else. In a lot of respects an open source policy, open data policy opened organizational openness in general. The government, in some ways, I think is ahead of a lot of the private sector.
David:  I wouldn't argue that. A concrete example of that is the SCAP work that we've been doing as part of the SCAP Security Guide. SCAP was something that was started by NIST, the National Institute of Standards in Technology. There are a lot of commercial organizations like Microsoft, and Red Hat, and others that got along to come up with SCAP policy that's machine readable.
I remember going back to our engineering organization and saying, "You know, we got to get this inside of our products," and we get them saying, "Oh, no. The addressable market for that is just government nerds."
Now it's to the point where people are developing PCI compliance policy as part of the SCAP Security Guide. We have contributions the world over. From what I understand, Lufthansa will run an SCAP scan every time they turn their planes on with the in‑flight entertainment system. It's really exciting to see that type of change moving on.
At the Red Hat Summit, over the past couple years, we would do SCAP sessions where Shawn Wells, who would give the presentation. He would pull the audience over the last couple years. It's like, "OK, how many people are from commercial and how many people are from Public Sector?"

A couple years ago it was like 80 percent Public Sector, and this year the poll was 85 percent commercial. It's really interesting to see how a lot of this innovation that has happened in government has actually made it for the benefit of private industry, which, to me, is a really good use of taxpayer dollars.