As the Supreme Court heads into its final day of announcing this session's decisions, one headline case remains — Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, more popularly recognized as the Texas abortion case. Unlike most cases that the Court hears, the events leading up to and surrounding this one have been garnering national attention since 2013 when Texas state Senator Wendy Davis staged a filibuster attempting to stop the now disputed regulations known as House Bill 2 (HB 2). The regulations have placed Texas among a collection of states pushing the limits of what the Court has deemed permissible by banning abortion at 20 weeks and imposing what are known as Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, or TRAP, laws.

HB2 requires all abortions — surgical, medical, and pill-induced —” be performed in centers that meet ambulatory surgical center standards, and thus they force many clinics to close without directly banning abortion. As such, they represent the leading edge of how anti-abortion activists have been chipping away at abortion access for decades.

The prevailing opinion regarding Whole Woman's Health's outcome has been that everything rides on Justice Kennedy. Popular opinion leading into the argument projected a 4-4 tie with the four liberals on one side equally balanced by the three conservative justices who were expected to be joined by the "swing Justice" Kennedy, on the other side. During oral arguments, however, Justice Kennedy posed a question about the possibility that Texas was imposing an unconstitutional burden on women seeking abortion, raising the possibility that he might side with the liberal justices in a 5-3 decision. So goes the tea leaf reading. While still speculative, there is yet another reason to consider as to why Kennedy might side with the liberals —” the combination of presidential politics and the Court's history of trying to avoid the political spotlight.

There is a compelling reason for the swing justice to land with the liberal justices in a 5-3 decision now against Texas's abortion regulations, thus sparing the Court from another round in the abortion politics fray

If Kennedy sides with the remaining conservative justices in upholding all or part of the Texas regulations, the ruling will only have immediate effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — the three states included in the 5^th Circuit that first heard Whole Woman's Health. This means that the Court will likely have to again hear a related case in order to settle the larger questions posed in the current dispute. With the Court's temporary block of Louisiana's closely related abortion regulations, that case is potentially waiting in the wings to be heard and to again drag the Court into the politics of abortion.

While the Court has periodically heard and decided major abortion cases, it has a history of trying to avoid contentious political issues like abortion. Before the 5^th Circuit broke with lower court rulings against similar abortion regulations to the ones now under review, the Court had been able to stay out of the central conflict in abortion politics. There is little to no reason to believe that they are now eager to engage with a string of abortion cases. If Kennedy forces a 4-4 split in Whole Woman's Health, however, they will likely have to.

Beyond a general apprehension to engage with contentious political issues, there is the matter of what stands to be gained by siding with Texas today, given the prospect of the coming presidential and Senate elections. While nothing is certain, much seems to point to the Democrats winning the presidency. While still less certain, there are also reasons to believe that the Democrats could possibly also take control of the Senate. If Hillary Clinton does win —” with our without the Democrats controlling the Senate — that translates to the Democrats taking the lead in filling Justice Scalia's empty seat on the bench with a justice who would most likely side with clinics over states trying to restrict access to abortion.

Restated, what would be gained by holding out on the national questions posed in Whole Woman's Health if the likely follow-up case would result in a 5-4 ruling against states looking to further restrict abortion access? Faced with those prospects, there is a compelling reason for the "swing justice" to land with the liberal justices in a 5-3 decision now against Texas's abortion regulations, thus sparing the Court from another round in the abortion politics fray.

Like all other predictions, though, this is just speculation. The Court has not shied away from 4-4 decisions or hitting "pause" on other contentious issues in the wake of Scalia's death (e.g. returning the most recent challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Zubik v. Burwell, back to the lower court). Kennedy and the Court will do what they will do. But by the same token, Court watchers and political scientists will do as we will do while we all wait for the Court to act.

Joshua C. Wilson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver. He is the author of The New States of Abortion Politics and The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars.

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. See more Mischiefs of Faction posts here.

Metaphors and models have finite lifespans. 

This usually happens for one of two reasons.

The first is that metaphors and models simplify and abstract a messy real world down to especially relevant or important points. Over time, these simplifications can come to be seen as too simple or not adequately capturing essential aspects of reality. (This seems to be what’s going on with the increasing pushback on “bimodal IT.” But that’s a topic for another day.)

The other reason is that the world changes in such a way that it drifts away from the one that was modeled.

Or it can be a bit of both. That’s the case with the pets and cattle analogy as it’s been applied to virtualized enterprise infrastructure and private clouds. 

The “pets vs. cattle” metaphor is usually attributed to Bill Baker, then of Microsoft. The idea is that traditional workloads are pets. If a pet gets sick, you take it to the vet and try to make it better. New-style, cloud-native workloads, on the other hand are cattle. If the cow gets sick, well, you get a new cow.

Pets and cattle roughly corresponded to the Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement taxonomy proposed by consultant Geoffrey Moore (of Crossing the Chasm fame). The former were stateful, big, long-lived, scale-up, and managed/maintained at the individual machine level. The latter were assumed to be stateless, small, transitory, scale-out, and managed at the level of the entire application (with individual VM instances destroyed and recreated in the event of a problem).

As an initial pass at distinguishing between traditional transactional apps and those designed along more cloud-native lines, the metaphor isn’t a bad one. I've argued that “ants” is a better fit than “cattle” because it captures the idea that individual service instances are not only disposable but they work together cooperatively to perform tasks. However, the overall concept of long-running mutable instances vs. short-lived disposable ones would seem to capture an essential distinction.

It still does, but as we as an industry continue to evolve DevOps practices and services-oriented architectural patterns for software defined infrastructure and orchestrated pools of containers, the metaphor is breaking down for several reasons. 

State matters

Many of the components/instances of a cloud-native application should be designed so that they are stateless. That is, they should use ephemeral storage—which is to say storage and data that only sticks around for the life of the instance itself. However, no one’s claiming that the data doesn’t need to live somewhere. For example, in twelve factor app parlance, there’s the concept of a backing service which "is any service the app consumes over the network as part of its normal operation. Examples include datastores (such as MySQL or CouchDB), messaging/queueing systems (such as RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd), SMTP services for outbound email (such as Postfix), and caching systems (such as Memcached)."

As we move to containerized infrastructures, the stateful vs. stateless dichotomy becomes particularly important because containers are explicitly designed to be immutable. As Keith Tenzer describes in this post about OpenShift v3 persistent storage: "Docker images are immutable and it is not possible to simply store persistent data within containers. When applications write to the Docker union file system, that data is lost as soon as the container is stopped.”

However, it’s still possible to associate persistent data with containers so that an entire application can be containerized. Keith goes on to note that:

OpenShift v3 supports using persistent storage through Kubernetes storage plugins. Red Hat has contributed plugins for NFS, ISCSI, Ceph RBD and GlusterFS to Kubernetes. OpenShift v3 supports NFS, ISCSI, Ceph RBD or GlusterFS for persistent storage. Kubernetes deploys Docker containers within a pod and as such, is responsible for storage configuration. Details about the implementation of persistent storage in Kubernetes can be found here.

Kubernetes allows you to create a pool of persistent volumes. Each persistent volume is mapped to a external storage file system. When persistent storage is requested from a pod, Kubernetes will claim a persistent volume from the pool of available volumes. The Kubernetes scheduler decides where to deploy the pod. External storage is mounted on that node and presented to all containers within pod. If persistent storage is no longer needed, it can be reclaimed and made available to other pods.

Most cloud-native applications require there to be persistent storage somewhere. While one can assume that it’s provided through a service running somewhere else, a platform supporting the development of complete cloud applications needs to provide persistence mechanisms within that platform.

Virtualization and cloud/software defined infrastructure convergence

Software-defined infrastructure technologies, also made initial simplifying assumptions in other areas such as networking architectures and the maintenance of running instances. Some of this was a sincere, if sometimes naive, desire to dump legacy encumbrances. However, it was also about getting an MVP out the door in a rapidly changing world. 

We’re seeing today the reintroduction of virtualization features required for “enterprise use cases” into projects such as OpenStack. Thus, Neutron (OpenStack networking) isn’t just about flat networking architectures and current versions of OpenStack support live migration of instances whether using shared storage or block-based storage associated with a single image. The fact that many of the same technologies such as the KVM hypervisor in Linux bridge enterprise virtualization and cloud technologies simplifies the bridging of the two worlds. (Of course, it’s probably increased the complexity of OpenStack relative to what it would look like in a purist cloud-only world. Such a purist OpenStack would also likely not be very useful.)

The continued evolution of the new application platform

Perhaps most of all though, the metaphor is breaking down because the idea that there are two canonical application architectures seems increasingly simplistic. 

I’ve already covered how persistent storage is an important component of most modern cloud-native applications. 

It’s also the case that many new applications will indeed be decomposed into lightweight single-function microservices that expose public APIs. However, getting to that point will be an evolution. Martin Fowler, who helped popularize the microservices term, has even argued for a “Monolith First” strategy in some cases, including for projects that are big enough to justify a shift to microservices over time. As a result, blanket statements about horizontal app scalability and disposable services don’t apply universally—even for apps that are greenfield and reasonably considered cloud-native.

Applications also have substantially different patterns that relate to how instances are clustered together using technologies such as Kubernetes (which OpenShift uses as its orchestration layer). Some types of applications are batch oriented in the vein of traditional high performance computing/grid while others are composed from multiple layers of services communication through APIs. There’s also considerable variety not only in the absolute scale of application components being scheduled and orchestrated, but also in the variety of the components (large, small, frequency of scheduling, etc.) and requirements related to quality-of-service, latency sensitivity, and so forth.

In short, while there are certain patterns that we tend to associate with cloud-native applications, there’s also much variety and even divergence in key aspects. Furthermore, it turns out that some traditional enterprise application characteristics such as persistent state and tightly-coupled components continue to play a role even for greenfield cloud apps. 

It’s not cattle and pets out there. It’s a whole menagerie!

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/agrilifetoday/6830903723

(iStock illustration)

Free parking makes it cheaper to own a car. But, as UCLA economist Donald Shoup has long argued, it makes everything else more expensive. Parking at the supermarket is embedded in the cost of groceries. Parking attached to an apartment building is built into the price of rent.

And because cities typically require developers to build a minimum amount of parking — say, one spot per bedroom in each housing unit, or two per thousand square feet of commercial space — you may pay for the cost of parking even if you never drive a car.

One analysis in Seattle found, for instance, that overbuilt parking at apartment buildings can drive up rents by nearly $250 a month. In Chicago, a similar recent study concluded that on average a third of costly parking at apartment buildings sits empty overnight. In Los Angeles, Shoup calculates, the mandate to provide minimum parking effectively reduces the number of units in a new apartment by 13 percent. And it can nearly double the cost there of constructing a shopping center if we're talking underground lots.

These requirements are often arbitrary (planning for parking, Shoup writes, "is more a political activity than a professional skill"). And they fall particularly heavily on the poor, the group least likely to have access to cars.

"People who are too poor to own a car," Shoup writes in the University of California's ACCESS Magazine,"pay more for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they drive to the store."

To put this in perspective: The cost of constructing above-ground parking in a major American city runs about $24,000 per space, in Shoup's research (this doesn't include the cost of buying the land underneath). An underground spot costs $34,000. Either way, a single parking space costs more than twice the median net worth of black and Hispanic households in America.

Regulations that require developers to bake those costs into shopping centers, offices or apartment buildings — whether people intend to drive there or are not — are a matter of inequality, Shoup argues. They force people who don't drive to subsidize those who do. They assume everyone does drive when many people can't. And they make it more expensive to build affordable housing, which means we get less of it.

"In a misguided attempt to provide free parking for everyone," Shoup writes, "cities have created a serious economic injustice by forcing developers to build parking spaces that many people can ill afford."

During his deadly attack on a packed Orlando nightclub where he killed 50 people and wounded many more, Omar Mateen called 911.  

On the recorded call, he pledge his loyalty to ISIS.  

A day later, a terrorist outside of Paris, used Facebook livestreaming to pledge his loyalty to ISIS while stabbing a police chief and his wife to death.

What's going on?

The answer is that these pledges aren't simply expressions of loyalty, they are expressions of fealty, a much more powerful means of connection.  

Fealty is something we haven't seen since the middle ages.  ISIS became capable of employing fealty once it rebuilt a barebones Caliphate and it is using it to transform modern terrorism.

To understand this, let's dig into fealty a bit. 

• Fealty is a strict, lifelong pledge of loyalty from a vassal to a lord.  It's public and irreversible.  (If you watch Game of Thrones, it's why everyone hates the Kingslayer, even if he was justified in his actions)
  
  
• Fealty obligates the vassal to act in the service of the lord, without any need for specific direction.  It also gives the protection of the lord to the vassal (in a religious context, salvation and redemption).
  
  
• Fealty made it possible to build large, geographically segmented networks in a world without instant communications and rapid travel.    

Fealty allows ISIS to get around some of problems of modern open source insurgency.   For example:

• A potential terrorist shouldn't express fealty until the attack.  Benefit: This prevents discovery during the grooming process.
  
  
• A public expression of fealty (FB, Twitter..) provides them with instant acceptance by the "lord"  Benefit: this provides them spiritual protection for the attack and maximizes the publicity for ISIS
  
  
• A Jihadi, or their local network, shouldn't ask for permission, planning, or support.  They should act on their own.  The attack itself is a demonstration of loyalty.  Benefit: this reduces chances of discovery and maximizes the innovative potential of the global network.

The more I think about it, fealty is an extremely useful way of harnessing and directing the power of an open source insurgency (aka, herding cats).

Architecturally, the ME varies from model to model, and over the past decade it has been growing in complexity. In general, it consists of of one or more processor cores, memory, system clock, internal bus, and reserved protected memory used as part of its own cryptography engine. It has its own operating system and suite of programs, and it has access to the main system's memory, as well as access to the network through the Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller. If you had control over the ME, then it would be a powerful subsystem that could be used for security and administration of your device.

The ME firmware runs various proprietary programs created by Intel for the platform, including its infamous Active Management Technology, Intel's Boot Guard, and an audio and video Digital Restrictions Management system specifically for ultra-high definition media called "Intel Insider." While some of this technology is marketed to provide you with convenience and protection, what it requires from you, the user, is to give up control over your computer. This control benefits Intel, their business partners, and large media companies. Intel is effectively leasing-out to the third-parties the rights to control how, if, and when you can access certain data and software on your machine.

Leah Woods of GNU Libreboot states that the "Intel Management Engine with its proprietary firmware has complete access to and control over the PC: it can power on or shut down the PC, read all open files, examine all running applications, track all keys pressed and mouse movements, and even capture or display images on the screen. And it has a network interface that is demonstrably insecure, which can allow an attacker on the network to inject rootkits that completely compromise the PC and can report to the attacker all activities performed on the PC. It is a threat to freedom, security, and privacy that can't be ignored."

At this time, developing free replacement firmware for the ME is basically impossible. The only entity capable of replacing the ME firmware is Intel and its OEM partners. And, since the ME is a control hub for your machine, you can no longer simply disable the ME like you could on earlier models, such as the Libreboot X200 laptop.

This means that if in the future we want more hardware that can achieve Respects Your Freedom certification, we will need to make it a "High-Priority" to support the work of those who are getting GNU Libreboot and 100% free system distributions running on other architectures, such as ARM, MIPS, and POWER8.