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Very good read. I totally agree with your sentiment that more and more, "engineering" is becoming just gluing together and managing cloud services and features.
My job as a sys admin has become the same. It's not about actually understanding the technology at a deep level and troubleshooting problems, it's about learning specific applets and features to click on and running down daily and weekly checklists.
And that's a good thing, IMHO. As an architect I don't want to rely on some single genius knowing secret incantations or anything like that.
Boring, tried and true services, repeatedly put together and if the organization allows the time for it, with excessive documentation.
No one's talking about secret incantations.
They're talking about knowing how your applications actually work, so you're not tied to the whims of a third party.
Is that what you get with Cloud? Because there are still a million ways to shoot yourself in the foot. The main difference is that the single genius doesn't need to implement things him/herself, but decisions still need to be taken and fragile setups can still be built.
Imagine an ec2 instance in a satellite account performing some business critical function with an instance role, whose custom IAM policy allows to do it in another account. Clouds are not giving you good engineering, they are giving you premade building blocks, you can absolutely still make a mess with those. Even more, the complexity and the immense portfolio of features can allow very creative ways to build very low-quality systems.
I think you can have good, boring, simple systems built by engineers. With or without Cloud services.
You can still make a mess, but you can't fuck up the building blocks, so it's a big improvement.
Using an ec2 instance is already a yellow flag, you have higher level services for most tasks.
Yeah in general you can't mess the building blocks from the PoV of availability or internal design. That is true, since you are outsourcing it. You can still mess them up from other points of view (think about how many companies got breached due to misconfigured S3 buckets).
Yep. My first move is to ask "could this just live in an ec2 box? Do we really need any of aws' marketed custom options?
But then I would ask, what's the point of paying 10-20x per computing unit at that point? If you just use ec2 instance, all AWS offers you is an API to manage them, is it worth the premium? Besides, you will still need to mess with a lot of other services (VPCs, SGs, etc.) anyways.
What's the selling point in your opinion?
Well I would have more questions, like why AWS at all.
But for some, cognito auth management is important, to align with other product goals.
cognito auth
But then at that point you are already vendor-locked, right? At that point, running on bare ec2 instances and taking more control in your hands (vs using even more AWS-specific services) is going to help very little, when your whole user management is now tied to a specific provider.
I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.
I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.
It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.
Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.
Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.
Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.
