Systems administration and operations are tightly scoped. DevOps is, in my opinion, an umbrella term representing all non-core engineering work: servers, build pipelines, on-call response, infrastructure, and more.
The tricky part is that a lot of these areas are relatively new, and the older ones like server admin have changed dramatically over the past two decades.
DevOps hasn't failed. DevOps is in its infancy and is going through technical, strategic, and philosophical growing pains.
DevOps has pivoted I think from the more original goal of having Devs do a lot of Ops things. This isn't really a viable solution as almost every compliance system mandates the people writing code and the people deploying/running systems are different.
What we have now is Ops that use things like source control. Write scripts that are more modular, reusable and composable. A new application can have cloud resources created and allocated in a day rather than a month of tickets to several other teams. This is also granting visibility to things that Ops may have been doing, but it was scripts on a PC or build server that only Ops had access to.
There's a story that has been circulating for years in Chinese. CHECK.
This story is almost a word for word translation of that. CHECK.
What is wrong with that statement? At the same time, A story that has been circulating for years in Chinese would also almost be a word for word translation of this story.
There are too many different tools in the space. I've been heavily researching workflow / ETL frameworks this week, and even after culling the ones that seemed like poor fits, I'm still left with:
You can use direct server return to manipulate the Ethernet frames so that packets don't travel back through the load balancer on the way to the parent switch.
That generally requires config on the serving hosts, which wasn't mentioned in the setup. I think I saw a reference to adding hosts with a different port number than the service port as well. For people in EC2-VPC (not classic), all their traffic is going through an Amazon NAT anyway, perhaps this new service is setting up translations there. (Note all the references to VPC, and never a mention of EC2-classic)
As a former Cognitive and Inscape employee, @mikeryan is largely correct. Note that fingerprinting happens on the TV - no actual content was sent back to us. Still absolutely creepy.*
Once the data is sold, the cat is out of the bag. The service might not send sensitive info by itself but the DBs of the buyers might contain enough data for cross-referencing to personally identify you without a shadow of doubt.
As another poster here asked: were there any ethical discussions in the organization?
The tricky part is that a lot of these areas are relatively new, and the older ones like server admin have changed dramatically over the past two decades.
DevOps hasn't failed. DevOps is in its infancy and is going through technical, strategic, and philosophical growing pains.