The COVID-19 pandemic created major opportunities for innovation and ushered in new technology solutions, but even as the danger subsides, this tech may still serve a purpose.
Whether it be face mask detection, temperature checks, facial recognition or AI surveillance, technology crafted to combat COVID-19 is here to stay. This may present a number of benefits, but there are ethical issues that persist.
Throughout the pandemic, school districts sought ways to mitigate the risk of outbreaks and ensure students were complying with safety regulations. AI-empowered cameras, for example, were one of the first pieces of technology implemented, allowing schools to monitor which students weren’t wearing masks.
“I think it’s helpful for COVID-19 stuff, but it seems a little intrusive,” said Noa Young, a 16-year-old junior from Atlanta’s Fulton County school district. “I think it’s strange that we were not aware of that.”
Although students knew cameras were monitoring them, they weren’t informed about the extent of the surveillance. The cameras have the capability to scan for body temperature and can also determine if a student is wearing their mask correctly.
In addition to monitoring for compliance, these cameras have the ability to assist with contact tracing. They can scan students’ faces and determine who they’ve been in contact with, enabling schools to retrace the steps of someone who contracts COVID-19. This is just one example of pandemic tech’s continued development, but as adoption and use spreads to other sectors and it’s used for other purposes, security and privacy concerns begin to pile up.
Courtenay Brown, 31, works in an Amazon warehouse and explained the scrutiny she is under throughout her workdays. Amazon uses similar AI surveillance to keep tabs on worker productivity, notifying management if someone deviates from their assigned task for too long. Many believe this level of surveillance creates an inhumane work environment.
“They basically can see everything you do, and it’s all to their benefit,” said Brown. “They don’t value you as a human being. It’s demeaning.”
The implementation of this technology is one of the factors pushing Amazon workers to take a stand through unionization efforts.
“There’s no way we’re going to stop or let this bring us down,” said Derrick Palmer, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. “It’s going to do the complete opposite. We’re going to go 10 times harder.”
Another byproduct of the pandemic was the shift to remote work in organizations across the country and in every industry. This shift created the need for remote access to an organization’s tools, information, data and assets, which didn’t come without inherent security risks—especially since such access often needed to happen literally overnight.
One way companies adjusted was through adoption of identity and access management (IAM) solutions. IAM can be used to identify, record and grant access in the cloud, an integral part of secure functionality in hybrid or remote workplaces.
“In the game of cybercrime cat and mouse, one could argue there is no such thing as being over-resourced. A major breach can bring down a company,” said World Wide Worx CEO Arthur Goldstuck.
Although IAM proved to be a workable solution to the challenge of remote access management, cybersecurity threats are ever-changing and now cyberattackers have shifted focus—they may be attacking IAM solutions.
“Sophisticated threat actors are actively targeting identity and access management infrastructure, and credential misuse is now a primary attack vector,” Gartner described in its Top Security and Risk Management Trends 2022 report.
To keep data safe, companies will have to be ready for an even wider range of cyberattacks, including threats to IAM.
These are just two examples of technological breakthroughs that were originally seen as innovative solutions but which have evolved to have their own set of problems.
Current events have revealed that there are two worlds in the employment landscape. One is digital, the other analog. For the most part, those in IT—the digital workers—have been unaffected by the spike in unemployment due to the economic side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it doesn’t mean they’ll be untouched in the long-term. As current events demonstrate, when it comes to the essentials in life, we’re all connected. Yet, the divide will continue to separate us to the detriment of all unless we do something about it.
When observing current events, I can’t help but think about Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent movie, Metropolis. It’s a science fiction film that depicts a world in which a small number of people live a privileged life in skyscrapers that tower high above the city. The rest of the population toils away below ground, doing the mundane work required to keep the city running. It’s a stunning piece of cinematography. The sets and special effects are breathtaking. What’s also impressive is that, for better or worse, so much of what Lang presented nearly 100 years ago has come to be.
You can view the full-length version of Metropolis here.
Figure 1: Scenes from the 1927 silent movie, Metropolis by Fritz Lang.
Lang’s vision of the future has a strange, almost eerie prescience for me, particularly as someone who has spent most of his adult life working in IT. It’s one that’s entirely possible, yet one I hope we avoid.
Allow me to elaborate.
Life Is A-OK in the Cloud
There’s a good argument to be made that today we live in Lang’s Metropolis, a world in which those who are doing really well live in the light of society while those who are just getting by live below ground in darkness.
The widening gap between prosperity and economic hardship is a trend that’s been unfolding over the last 30 years. We’ve become accustomed to it. Sadly, it’s no longer newsworthy.
What is newsworthy is the dramatic spike in unemployment due to the business shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The uptick in unemployment reveals a troubling set of circumstances: If you’re a digital worker chances are you’re still working. If you work in the analog world, that place where factories, restaurants, airlines, movie theaters, hotels, cruise ships and warehouses exist, there’s a good chance you or someone you know is out of a job, for now anyway.
Take a look at the graph from the US Private Sector Job Quality Index, a project from Cornell University Law School and others, by way of vox.com. It lists the jobs that are most vulnerable to layoffs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. IT workers don’t even make the list. It’s as if we live in another world.
Figure 2: Information workers are absent from the list of jobs at risk due to COVID-19.
The long and the short of it is that for developers, sysadmins, SREs and all the other people working in information technology, the recent economic downturn is but a blip in the daily news feed. For those manning a cash register, taking a ticket at the local cineplex, cutting hair or driving for a rideshare service, it’s a life-altering event. Or, to put it terms of Lang’s film, those of us who live in the clouds are doing well, and for those on the ground, it’s a different story.
Now, consider this: What if all the people who are presently laid off from their jobs find out there are no jobs to go back to? What if the economic recovery is slower than anticipated or society gets so accustomed to doing without that consumption doesn’t resume? Is such a scenario possible? Yes. Is it probable? Dunno. Will those of us in IT who work remotely all over the planet, from the comfort of our wired office, suffer? I doubt it. But, as for the rest, what then?
Let’s go back to the movie.
A Workforce Divided
There’s a point in the film when the protagonist, Freder (the son of the industrialist who built Metropolis), goes to his father to inquire about a catastrophic underground explosion shown earlier in the film.
The son asked,“Your magnificent city, Father, and you, the brain of this city, and all of us in this city’s light … and where are the people, Father, whose hands built your city?”
The father responded, “Where they belong.”
The son asked, “Where they belong? In the depths?”
His father nodded his head yes. (See the scene here).
There you have it. With that one physical gesture, Lang foreshadows a future which might very well be at our doorstep. As I mentioned earlier, it’s eerie, it’s prescient and it looks as if it’s coming to be.
What Does This All Have to Do with DevOps?
Those of us in DevOps have made valuable contributions to the world. We’ve done dramatically more good than harm. We’ve also been well compensated. The average salary for a SRE in the USA is $131,340, with a low of $60K and a high of $192K. Yet, the top salary for grocery clerk at Ralph’s supermarket is $22 an hour, which comes out to $44K a year over a 50 week year.
Do SREs deserve such a high salary? Of course, they do. Does a grocery clerk deserve only $44K a year in comparison? At the end of 2019, it would have been easy to say, yes. It’s a low skill, low education job. But that was then, and this is now. As of this writing, toilet paper is a premium commodity and the shelves need to be stocked with it. I’ll wager that in some circles, paying someone $50 an hour to get the rolls on the shelf is reasonable compensation. It all depends on how much people want toilet paper.
Am I being a bit dramatic? A little, but still, it’s worth thinking about.
So, what’s the important take away? Let’s go back to Metropolis one last time.
At the beginning of the film, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, Freder, was frolicking about in a lush arboretum-like greenhouse atop a skyscraper. He was surrounded by pretty maidens dancing. An elevator door opened into the garden. Freder observed as a group of raggedy waifs from beneath the city exited out of the elevator. A woman leading the waifs was at the head of the group. The waifs looked around in amazement at such luxury. Then, Freder’s servants ushered the group back into the elevator to exit. Freder was obviously affected by the waifs. He went into the depths of the city to investigate.
Shortly thereafter, Freder went to see his father to inquire about the explosion I described earlier. His father asked, “What were you doing in the machine halls, Freder?”
The son responded, “I wanted to look into the faces of the people whose little children are my brother, my sisters…”
It’s a powerful scene. It makes me wonder how many of the faces I’ve seen of those who were working in February are now sitting home, unemployed and unable to pay the rent in April.
The takeaway is this: We’re all connected at a level much deeper than the trivial interactions of the given social network. Current events have demonstrated the fact in spades. COVID-19 was first reported in China around November 17, 2019. On April 4, 2020, less than six months later, there were 240 cases reported in the state of South Dakota in the United States. If that’s not connection, I don’t know what is.
Those of us who work in the cloud are doing quite well, despite the setbacks caused by the global pandemic. But, there’s a growing number of us who are not doing so well and won’t be for the foreseeable future. It’s easy when everything is peaches and cream to be unaware of a world in which six-figure salaries are not the norm. But, when things go south and there’s no toilet paper to be had, the realization that we’re all in this together smacks us square in the face, like it or not.
The question then becomes, given that we’re all connected, what type of world do we want to share, the one in Lang’s Metropolis or something better?
It’s something worth thinking about. The pandemic will pass, but the underlying disparities will remain unless we do something about them.
In my last post on devopsy.kinsta.cloud I asked the question, “Where is the DBA in the DevOps Conversation?” I have wonderful news. I’ve found them! Having not been offered a seat at the table with everyone else, the DBAs have decided to have their own party in the form of a survey and corresponding report by Unisphere Research for the Independent Oracle Users’ Group.
Until now so much of the research, literature, and web content on the topic of DevOps has been completely devoid of talk about the database and DBAs. The oversight was significant and troubling given the immense strategic business value of any organization’s ever growing store of data. The IOUG report does an excellent job of framing the case for DevOps in terms of the special considerations required when trying to adapt to the lightning fast pace of change in modern IT.
For me, the biggest take away from the report is that DBAs and their managers are feeling the pain of increased release velocity acutely.
Interestingly, while the age of automation and cloud may be upon us, an increasing number of database managers and professionals report that they are being mired in manual processes. More than one-third cited this as a challenge, up a dramatic 162% from four years ago.
There’s no question that companies large and small understand that releasing quality services and features based on market demand at a faster rate than your competition keeps your organization on top. It’s also apparent that product development and most of IT operations have made the necessary investments in process modification and the automation necessary to truly achieve faster delivery. Unfortunately the report confirms what the good folks at my company, Datical, have been saying all along. The lack of safe, intelligent deployment automation options for the database is starting to limit the potential gains of DevOps implementation…and the data team knows it. But it’s not the actual script execution that takes so much time. It’s all the time spent before that maintenance window making sure that security isn’t being compromised, that the change is compliant with external regulations and corporate standards, and that it won’t negatively affect your data.
Today’s manual database operations, processes, and approval time are among the causes of delays holding up the real-time enterprise, many database managers and professionals admit. Frantic development cycles and the accelerated pace of business innovation requires that data and insights be available at a moment’s notice. Close to 41% of respondents report that it takes a week or more to approve change requests, as well as to configure new databases for key purposes, even for testing.
To safely reduce these cycle times a DevOps solution for database deployments has to harness the expertise and experience of an organization’s DBAs to fuel intelligent, environment-aware automated validation of these change requests. The automation can’t simply parse the SQL script looking for patterns that may be problematic. It must be able to evaluate all 5 W’s associated with the change and make the correct determination as to whether it is acceptable or needs further review. By focusing the valuable finite resource that is your organization’s DBAs on only those changes that need their special attention, you’ll reap even greater rewards from your DevOps investments.
I’ve just scratched the surface of what’s available in this report and I highly recommend you read and share it with the DBAs at your company. The survey covers responses from folks in every size company and at every level of the database team. It is full of facts and observations that will be readily familiar to any DevOps enthusiast or practitioner. DBAs, IT, Developers, and the business are now all speaking the same language when it comes to DevOps. Do what you can in your organization to make sure they are speaking that language to each other.
About the Author/Pete Pickerill
Pete Pickerill is Vice President of Products and Co-founder of Datical. Pete is a software industry veteran who has built his career in Austin’s technology sector. Prior to co-founding Datical, he was employee number one at Phurnace Software and helped lead the company to a high profile acquisition by BMC Software, Inc. His ability to understand product demands from a customer’s perspective and translate those demands into actionable product and development plans has led to expanded duties at every company for which he’s worked.
