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Won't somebody think of the ops engineers?

Welcome to Protocol Cloud, your comprehensive roundup of everything you need to know about the week in cloud and enterprise software. This week: some big news about Protocol's enterprise coverage, why #hugops appears on Twitter during cloud outages and several U.S. national security agencies attribute the SolarWinds hack to Russia.
We're excited to announce that next week we're launching Protocol | Enterprise, where we'll offer dramatically expanded coverage of cloud and enterprise technology.
It's been almost a year since we launched Protocol (the longest year ever recorded), and now we're raising the stakes going into 2021. Protocol | Enterprise will be your one stop for news, analysis and research on the people, power and politics of enterprise technology. We'll look beyond the product launches and sales pitches to help you understand how enterprise tech is changing, the people who are making it happen and the implications for businesses everywhere.
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You've probably already seen stories from Joe Williams in this newsletter and on our site. He joined us in December to cover enterprise software, and starting next week he'll begin contributing to this newsletter, which will now come out twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays under the name Protocol | Enterprise.
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It's really hard to avoid that feeling of exasperation when a cloud service you rely upon goes down, and often harder still to resist complaining or making fun of it on Twitter. But lots of other people, those who know how cloud services actually work, have a very different reaction during those moments: sympathy for the engineers trying to fix the problem.
Both groups were out in force Monday during Slack's several-hours-long outage, when the workplace collaboration app refused to allow anyone to collaborate on the first day back from work after the holiday break. While end users whined (with varying degrees of jest) about not being able to work, many of the people responsible for bringing you cloud services responded with an empathetic hashtag: #hugops.
A massive outage like Slack's — where basically nothing worked for every user around the globe — is a nightmare scenario for any operations engineer tasked with keeping the cloud online.
We've come to expect so much from these services that we feel compelled to ask for the manager every time something goes wrong, despite the fact that they are far more performant, easy to use and flexible than the workplace software options of even five or six years ago.
And maybe lay off the actual hugs for a few more months.
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
High finance: Our latest Protocol Manual, Reinvention of Spending, takes a look at the way the pandemic has remade yet another part of our lives: consumer finance. From grabbing a cup of coffee to buying a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, after this year you might never make a transaction in the same way.
Under the dome: A new Congress was sworn in this week, and with the outcome of Tuesday's runoff elections in Georgia pointing toward Democratic control of the Senate, Issie Lapowsky and Emily Birnbaum outline what you can now expect regarding tech legislation this year.
Union coders: Google employees broke ground this week by forming a union of both technical and non-technical employees, hoping for a greater voice in how workers are treated. Protocol's Anna Kramer examined what the group hopes to accomplish and how likely this new labor movement is to spread to other tech companies.
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
Thanks for reading. We'll be back with Protocol | Enterprise on Monday.
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