[Info-vax] New VSI Roadmap (yipee!)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-01 18:02:26 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> Bottom line - No matter what new features are added, the OpenVMS  
> customer community would simply revolt if OpenVMS were to evolve  to 
> 40+ (ok, let's say "many") security patches per month. Most would  say 
> throw out the new features or third party SW.

If the patches install trivially and work transparently and without 
introducing issues, probably not; the vendor won't get thrown out, and 
the vendor might even earn some praise.  However, should the blizzard 
of patches cause applications to tip over, then the patches will be 
deferred and tested and the whole process becomes suspect, and 
degenerates into a demonstration of the firepower of a fully-armed and 
operational manure spreader.

BTW: paralleling the need for patch deployments, one of the approaches 
that's becoming very common is continuous deployment; several new 
software releases a day.  So are tools that deliberately inject faults; 
VMS engineering used fault injection.   Some software development sites 
freak out about this deployment pattern, and about deliberately 
crashing servers.   Others use it.  Whether these are viable depends on 
the site and the applications, but for many folks, this is happening 
now — even at some VMS sites, just because their own software updates 
and patches and deployments must get faster.  Related: 
<http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html> 
<http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v3/ctm.html> 
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol6num1/vol6num1art3.txt> 
<http://www.sqetraining.com/sites/default/files/articles/XDD2639filelistfilename1_0.pdf> 
 But I digress.

But any vendor that's trying to leverage my own dislike of security 
patches has to give me an alternative to the present mess — applying 
patches is somewhere between a hassle to a massive hassle, but there's 
presently no alternative to doing exactly that, as porting to another 
platform is somewhere between expensive and infeasible, and even a 
hypothetical boutique security product is still going to have some 
number of patches that will need to be applied expeditiously, and that 
won't (and had better not) tip over production.   But without a viable 
and affordable alternative to the current patch-morass, this all 
degrades into us old folks up on the porch, yelling at the kids 
patching up the lawn, and to the inclusion of the occasional 
<http://farm1.staticflickr.com/234/522498210_b2a45eb896.jpg> meme.



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