Welcome to Technology Short Take 197! I’ve been traveling for business for the last week, so this Technology Short Take has a tad fewer links than I typically include. Even so, I still have links on radical new network designs, the impacts of AI on code security, things beginners get wrong about AWS IAM, and more! Let’s get into the content.

Networking

• This story about a radical network redesign at AWS—along with this accompanying arXiv paper—was intriguing to me. I’m not a networking expert, but designing networks with quasi-random connections between endpoints definitely flies in the face of the traditional wisdom. I do wonder, though, if this is the sort of technology that only makes sense for the hyperscalers, and not for the rest of us.
• Doug Dawson provides a quick update on current encryption standards and what he terms the “pending encryption crisis” presented by quantum computing.
• It would appear that AI is affecting even Cisco’s well-known industry certifications, as outlined by Daniel Dib.

Security

• CodeRabbit shared the results of an analysis of PRs to open source projects showing that AI-written code produces ~1.7x more issues.
• Along the same lines, Jens Wessling of Veracode indicates that 45% of all AI-generated code samples contained OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities.
• Anyone who didn’t expect seemingly-dangerous AI agent security exploits to appear hasn’t been paying attention. Enterprise AI tools don’t appear exempt, either.
• The complex interdependencies of open source software projects once again means that a single critical vulnerability threatens a much larger number of projects and tools.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• This is an older post, but the author recently updated it—check out Marcus Noble’s recommended resources for Kubernetes newbies.
• I am not yet sure about pulumi do (direct operations for any cloud resource; see the Pulumi blog post about it). On one hand, I can see the utility in situations where you “just need a quick” whatever. On the other hand, isn’t this kind of antithetical to the core premise of infrastructure as code?
• The scale of the AI bubble is staggering.
• Jonathan Vogel explains what every AWS beginnner gets wrong about IAM. I thought his metaphor comparing users and roles to employee badges and visitor passes was a good one.
• Rose Security has a comprehensive blog post on building an AWS image factory (to create custom AMIs).

Operating Systems/Applications

• Omarchy is not a distribution, just a collection of dotfiles.
• George Whittaker examines the Flatpak sandbox and some of its real-world security issues.
• OpenBSD 7.9, the 60th OpenBSD release, was recently made available.

Programming/Development

• Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman authored this ACM paper discussing the effects of AI on early-in-career (EiC) developers. I found some powerful insights here—this is well worth a read.

Storage

• Stephen Akinyemi of Microsandbox describes how they made their filesystem 47x faster by deleting it.

Virtualization

• William Lam has published a spate of articles on VCF 9.1 over the past couple of weeks. If VCF is your jam, then you’re bound to find some useful information in these posts.
• And speaking of VCF 9.1, Eric Sloof melds the LLM work he’s been doing recently with the VCF documentation. I believe this is a good use of local models.

Career/Soft Skills

• I included a link to this cautionary tale of how KPIs kill efficiency in the hope of helping the manager-types among my readers prevent this from happening to their organizations/teams.
• I found this quote about the use of AI tools in the workplace pertinent: “Use the tool where you can verify precisely what it produces.”
• “Well, I’m willing to bet that you, my fellow technologist, have benefitted from the distributed technology community on countless occasions.” Yes, I absolutely have! And because of that, I wouldn’t want to use tools that threaten this community, and that’s why I appreciated this discussion that the community is the achievement and the achievement is the community.

That is all I have for you this time around—but I’ll be back in a couple weeks with another Technology Short Take and another set of links to data center technologies and related areas. In the meantime, if you come across something interesting you feel I should include in a future Tech Short Take, feel free to send it my way! You can reach me via Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter/X, several different Slack communities, or even email (my address isn’t hard to find). Thanks for reading!