The Actuator – July 4th

Happy 4th of July! Holiday or not, the Actuator always delivers. I do hope you are taking the time to spend with family and friends today. You can come back and read this post later, I won’t mind.

As always, here are some links from the Intertubz that I hope will hold your interest. Enjoy!

Debugging Serverless Apps: from monitoring invocations to observing a system of functions

As our systems become more complex, it becomes more important than ever to start labeling everything we can. Metadata will become your most important data asset.

4 Types of Idle Cloud Resources That Are Wasting Your Money

Speaking of containers, they are likely a vampire resource in your cloud environment along with a handful of other allocated resources which are lightly used.

Dealing with the insider threat on your network

Buried in this article is this gem: “…security is not so much about monitoring the perimeter anymore; companies need to be looking on the inside - how communications are happening on the network, how systems are talking to each other and most importantly what are the users doing on the network.” This is why anomaly detection, built on top of machine learning algorithms, are the next generation of tools to defend against threats.

LA Fitness, ‘Hotel California’ and the fallacy of digital transformation

The author uses LA Fitness as one example, but I know of dozens more. This scenario is very common, where a company chooses to modernize only parts of their business. Usually, the part chosen is one that generates revenue, and not with customer service.

Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up

Two interesting parts to this story. The first is the admission that Apple knew their Maps feature was going to be poor right from the start, but they knew they needed to launch something. Second, the way they are making an effort to collect data and respect user privacy at the same time.

Here's how Amazon is able to poach so many execs from Microsoft

The answer combines a dollar sign in front and lots of numbers after.

About 300K expected to visit Las Vegas for July 4th

With July 4th on a Wednesday, more and more people are thinking "WOOHOO, SIX DAY WEEKEND!"

Happy Independence Day! Here's a picture of me riding an eagle: