Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Matt Hicks is the new Red Hat CEO, visual accessibility is in focus, and Google Cloud rolls out ARM instances.

1. Cormier out, Hicks in

First up this week: Matt Hicks replaces Paul Cormier as Red Hat CEO. The “surprising” change sees the outgoing chief shuffle over to become board chair.

Analysis: Conspiracy theorists gonna theorize

People genuinely seem to like Hicks. But, inevitably, a few are connecting Cormier’s move with last week’s news about Systemd maven Lennart Poettering leaving Red Hat for Microsoft.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ac-cent-tchu-ates the positive: Red Hat names new CEO

It had been rumored … that Paul Cormier, the company’s CEO and president since 2020 … might retire soon. That rumor wasn’t true. [But] in a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that … Cormier, who has been with Red Hat for over 14 years [will] become chairman of the board.
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In 2003, when Cormier was Red Hat’s VP of engineering, he led the company to leave behind its early inexpensive distribution, Red Hat Linux, to move to a full business Linux: … RHEL. This was not a popular move. [But] today, RHEL is the industry’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
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As for Hicks, he’s a popular figure in the company. … Thanks to his work with Red Hat OpenShift, he saw Red Hat move from being primarily a Linux powerhouse to a hybrid cloud technology leader as well.

It’s great news, says dralley:

This is great news! My few direct interactions with Matt have been very positive.

But some commentators can’t get past the Lennart Poettering story. For example, this Anonymous Coward:

What was Hicks’ relationship with Poettering? If adversarial, how did he feel about his work?

Was Cormier protecting Poettering?

2. Automatic Accessibility Overlays: Blind Users Can’t See the Point

Are you worried about your content’s accessibility to users who rely on screen reading software? You should be.

Analysis: Beware of magical quick fixes

You can buy “overlays” that promise to make your site accessible to blind and partially-sighted users. But there’s a growing angry chorus of the visually handicapped who say these things actually make life worse.

Amanda Morris: For Blind Internet Users, the Fix Can Be Worse Than the Flaws

Over a dozen companies provide … automated accessibility web services. … These companies list major corporations like Hulu, eBay and Uniqlo, as well as hospitals and local governments, among their clients. Built into their pitch is often a reassurance that their services will … keep companies from facing … litigation.
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But it’s not working out that way. Users … say the software offers little help, and some of the clients that use AudioEye, accessiBe and UserWay are facing legal action anyway. … In addition to poorly labeled images, buttons and forms, blind users have documented issues with overlays that include being unable to use their keyboards to navigate web pages either because headings on the page are not properly marked or because certain parts of the page are not searchable or selectable.

These complaints definitely resonate with u/Mael5trom:

As someone who builds websites and tries to do my best to make them very accessible … not only are they bad for accessibility, companies have been sued for using [overlays] in lieu of actually fixing accessibility issues. … So if there is very much a self-interest in not using those kinds of quick fixes.
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The problem is that many of those products demo really well (that’s where they seem to focus) to those that don’t know a lot about accessibility. While I am not an expert, thankfully (IMO) those I learned front end dev from always put an emphasis on accessibility and I’ve tried to continue to pay attention and amplify voices promoting it when I can. I’m sure I make plenty of mistakes, but I’m glad folks … will speak up and share [their] experience so those who are willing to can learn from them.

Any tips for devs? Here’s rossz:

To make a website accessible, first view it without a stylesheet. … If your website is unusable to you with sight, it’s going to be even worse for a blind person.
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Rewrite your website to be usable without the stylesheet. Reorder things like long menus so they come at the end, not at the beginning. You do this because text to speech will first read all the damn menu elements every time a new page is loaded if it’s at the top, which is damn annoying. If you are competent with writing style sheets, you can put the menu whereever you want on the page for the sighted users. Yes, the website looks like **** without the stylesheet. That’s not important. How does it read?
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Include [ALT text] in every single image. You don’t need to get all that detailed most of the time, e.g. “Child holding fish” is good enough. There are going to be exceptions where you might need to be more descriptive, just use some common sense. For example, if the type of fish is important, include that. If the race of the child is important, include it.
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Just following these simple steps gets you 90% there and makes you more accessible than just about every website on the planet.

3. Finally! Google Cloud Does ARM

AWS has them. Azure has them. Heck, even Oracle Cloud has them. ARM instances are now de rigueur for IaaS providers. Welcome to the party, Google.

Analysis: Faster, greener, cooler

As I’ve said before, ARM chips are an increasing fixture in cloud and on-premises data centers—especially those that value “performance per Watt.” And, as if to emphasize my point, Google is pricing these VMs aggressively.

Frederic Lardinois: Google Cloud launches its first Arm-based VMs

It’s been a long time coming, but Google Cloud today announced its first Arm-based VMs, following AWS, with its Graviton instances, and Azure, which also recently launched Arm VMs. … Google Cloud is following Azure’s lead here by using chips from Ampere. These new VMs, which are now in preview, will join Google Cloud’s line of Tau VMs, [which] offer a better price/performance ratio … under the ‘Tau T2A’ moniker.
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In addition to using these VMs as part of Google Cloud’s Compute Engine, Google also now supports them as part of its Kubernetes Engine, the Dataflow stream and batch processing service. … The new VMs are now available in a small number of regions, including us-central (Iowa – Zone A, B, F), europe-west4 (Netherlands – Zone A, B, C) and asia-southeast1 (Singapore – Zone B, C), but will come to other data centers over time.

Not a moment too soon, thinks Dylan Martin:

It’s been a rocky year for Arm. First, the British chip designer lost a financial boost with its sale to Nvidia killed by regulator scrutiny. Then Arm laid off staff as it made plans for an initial public offering, and now market conditions aren’t looking great for that IPO. The good news for Arm is that the cloud world has been increasingly warming up to the alternative instruction set architecture.
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While Google Cloud didn’t provide any performance comparisons … Ampere leapt up and said a T2A instance with 32 of its vCPUs was up to 31 percent faster than Google’s N2 instance using Intel’s Ice Lake silicon with the same number of vCPUs. This was based on an estimated score for … SPEC CPU 2017 Integer Rate.
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It’s very safe to say that cloud providers adopting Arm is definitely a trend now. [It] is now supported by six of the world’s largest cloud service providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Other cloud providers are getting behind Arm too, such as JD Cloud, UCloud, and Equinix Metal.

Who could have seen this coming? Hannu Krosing for one:

I was surprised, five years ago, to discover that my Android phone … ran PostgreSQL faster than my Intel laptop. [It] was a strong hint of things to come.

The Moral of the Story:
All things are ready, if our mind be so

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or [email protected].

Image: What Is Picture Perfect (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)