[scarface74]

And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself.

And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

When I was at the 60 person company where I got my start in “cloud”, I could experiment with different types of databases, scaling, and other technologies just by throwing something together and deleting the entire stack.

I worked for a company that aggregated publicly available health care provider data (ie no PII) for major health care providers. They used our APIs for their own websites and mobile apps.

When we got a new customer (ie large health care provider), our systems automatically scaled.

When a little worldwide pandemic happened in 2020 and our traffic spiked by 100%+, guess how long it took us to provision new servers.

Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.

[re-thc]

> And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it.

> Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows!

> I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage

How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.

[scarface_74]

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case

So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped?

“unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.”

> So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

[CoolCold]

> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.

I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators.

Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev environment in terms of ssh/db endpoints.

[scarface_74]

At my n-2 job (2017-mid 2018), I was the dev lead when management decided to “move to the cloud”. They hired a bunch of “consultants” who were old school operations people who only knew how to do lift and shifts.

I didn’t know cloud from a whole in the wall. But the internal IT department treated AWS just like they did their Colo. I thought AWS was just a bunch of VMs and I treated it as such for a green field implementation.

I studied for the AWS Solution Architect certification just so I would know what I didn’t know and to be able to come up with some intelligent ideas for phase 2.

I ended up leaving that job and working for a startup. The CTO knew I had only theoretical knowledge of AWS. But I had good system design instincts and he liked my ideas. I was hired as a senior developer. But that rapidly morphed into a cloud architect role. I took advantage of AWS and all of its locked in goodness including moving everything to either Lambda and Fargate (serverless Docker).

I had admin rights to everything until I voluntarily gave myself the same constraints to production that everyone else had when we hired a couple of operation guys.

We scaled without any issues as the company grew and Covid happened - we worked in the healthcare industry.

Now I work for AWS. But I’ve done my share of managing servers since the mid 90s as part of my job. That’s a life I don’t ever want to go back to.