The Wizened Sage

61 Replies
PHOTO PROMPT © Bill Reynolds

The pickup was part of the landscape, as old and worn as the rocks. It’s owner, a weathered tree of a man, was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and staring off into the distance, supposedly listening to Tom.

“Well?” Tom finished.

We knew his experience; if anybody could fix it, it would be him.

The man stubbed the cigarette out on the plate-steel bed of the truck and put the butt into a pouch. His eyes sparkled, belying his age.

“T’ain’t a firewall issue, it’s coding.  Y’all can’t just take a datacenter app and think it’ll work in the cloud, now.”

***

word count = 100

Friday Fictioneers is hosted by  Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.  This week’s prompt is here and uses a photo by @ Bill Reynolds. If you want to join or see other stories, go to the inlinkz linkup.

61 thoughts on “The Wizened Sage”

      1. GHLearner

        My workplace runs its own little private cloud. We aren’t allowed servers that are outside of the EU. For data transfer and sharing this is good since it’s as safe as they can make it. There are no shared applications and the like though. It depends on what you need. I happily use Amazon, Google and whatnot for private, not so important stuff. For important stuff I still prefer mostly offline, encrypted and with a good password manager (that isn’t in the cloud).

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓
        1. trentpmcd Post author

          I don’t know a huge amount about our cloud setup since all of the sites I host are in one of our data centers. We do use one of the major vendors but have our own private cloud supplied by the vendor with dedicated VMs in the US, etc. All transactions do go through our data center and firewall. I have no clue on the details. The only thing “cloud” I know is Akamai since I deal with them daily…

          Like

          Reply ↓
  5. Michael Humphris

    When it rains the clouds dissipate, I trust that a lot of the app’s will end up dismantled. However I right enjoyed reading your take on this weeks prompt

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓
    1. trentpmcd Post author

      It is possible, and then everyone will cry to get back to the good, old fashioned data center, where, hopefully, it never rains… (until the next log4j style storm hits) Thanks.

      Like

      Reply ↓
  7. Rowena

    Trent, I’m hoping your take is not a prophetic insight into the future of the data centre at the uni where Geoff works. The building it’s in is being knocked down and it needs to be re-located. I can see them putting it into a rusty ute given their overall lack of respect for it. I have no idea how that equipment is still running.
    Best wishes,
    Rowena

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓
    1. trentpmcd Post author

      The data center won’t be moved into an old heap, they’ll move everything to the cloud and get rid of the data center all together! In the real world, a lot of people are trying to get rid of legacy data centers, but I can’t see them being totally replaced any time soon. As the wizened sage in this story says, you can’t just lift and shift all apps from a data center to the cloud. For many it just doesn’t work…

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓
      1. Rowena

        I love the term “legacy data centres”. I used to work in marketing for a local IT business just when the cloud was introduced. My boss wasn’t keen on the whole idea, but then again he was a Novell Network Engineer like my husband back in the day. My concern with the cloud is that old saying “what goes up, has to come down”. I’m not sure what raining data will look like but it won’t be pretty.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓
        1. trentpmcd Post author

          lol, I was a Novell Network Engineer back in the day… So funny that there are so many of us around, but no Novell. Which goes to show that no matter how huge and iron tight something in tech seems, it isn’t forever. Thank you, IBM. Problem with the cloud is, places like AWS become a single point of failure for huge swaths of the Internet and a tiny DNS glitch recently brought down a huge chunk of AWS, affecting tens of millions of people, even causing some life and death situations.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply ↓
          1. Rowena

            It’s funny how I have this writing blogging all the way over on the US East Coast, who synergises so well into Geoff’s world as well. The uni has been hit by a few nasties out of China too and Geoff was rung I think by the network support person in ASIO (national security). I was rather proud of him.
            I spend so much of my time researching the past, I’m pretty much out of the present.

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply ↓
            1. trentpmcd Post author

              It is a small world. I’ve bumped into a few people blogging that connect with very different sides than the straight up blogging end where we met. One of the reasons it is so fun to blog – making those oblique connections across the planet :)

              Like

              Reply ↓

Express Yourself

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s