William Vambenepe explains his frustration with PaaS Cloud infrastructure — “can you handle the truth?”

…the instance monitoring console Google just rolled out is seriously lacking. As is too often the case with IT monitoring systems, it reports what is convenient to collect, not what is useful. I’m sure they’ll fix it over time. What this console does well (and really the main point of this blog) is illustrate the challenge of how much information about the underlying infrastructure should be surfaced.

Hard not to notice that his vent includes the phrase “as is too often the case with IT monitoring systems”, which indicates he is getting annoyed by something not specifically a cloud issue. Consoles and dashboards are rarely up to snuff, so you would expect this to be the same no matter what you call your IT environment. Then again, everything in the cloud is a cloud issue. The problem becomes you ONLY get a dashboard in the cloud, nothing more. Options are limited when you do not get to decide what they will be, just accept them as they are delivered to you.

Segmentation in virtual environments was the topic of a call I was on this morning. It reminded me that virtualization gets a hard time for something that exists in many other areas of “emerging” technology. Take wireless, for example, which now includes co-tenancy multi-mode configurations on devices like the RFS 7000 Wireless RF Switch from Motorola. Although not mentioned in their list of security options, it can support up to 256 WLANs using multi-ESS/BSSID traffic segmentation:

Exceptional level of data and network protection without sacrificing fast roaming, including: WPA2-CCMP (with 802.11i fast roaming options); Stateful Firewall at Layer 2 and Layer 3 for the wired and wireless network with role based configurations; Geofencing, integrated RADIUS Server; IPSec VPN Gateway; Secure Guest Access Provisioning; 802.11w for management frame protection, and 24×7 dedicated security via Motorola’s Wireless IPS, providing the advanced technology required to detect any rogue network, including 802.11n

It seems to me that wireless (and network in general) segmentation is pressing ahead; it will be deployed with little resistance from the standards council other than what has already been said. Cisco will not be asked for guidance. Meanwhile, security professionals and managers are hotly debating whether mixed-mode virtualization should be allowed and some are even asking virtualization vendors to provide guidance.

Britain has a long history of deforestation and almost ran out of timber during World War I. A commission was established to make the country more self-reliant after the war, but this still led to a decline in native woods. The Scottish Highlands are a good example as more than 90% of the trees are gone. Many lands were never replanted and today still lay barren. Now they may be reforested by war planes.

Forests are to be created by dropping millions of trees out of aircraft. Equipment installed in the huge C-130 transport aircraft used by the military for laying carpets of landmines across combat zones has been adapted to deposit the trees in remote areas including parts of Scotland.

Flying 1,000 feet above the ground at 130 knots allows 3,000 cones to be planted in one minute. Interesting to read a real-world version of swords-to-plowshares.

Update 2019:

1) The fashion brand Timberland has announced “we’ve made a bold commitment to plant 50 million trees around the world over the next 5 years”.

2) A Seattle startup has announced its drones now can plant 100 trees/hour

These drones scout a burned area, mapping it down to as high as centimeter accuracy, including objects and plant species, fumigate it efficiently and autonomously, identify where trees would grow best, then deploy painstakingly designed seed-nutrient packages to those locations. It’s cheaper than people, less wasteful and dangerous than helicopters and smart enough to scale to national forests currently at risk of permanent damage.