[jmogly]

Absolutely agree, for the most part. Luckily I think the tide is going out and developers are going to be forced to start actually solving problems in their domain out of necessity.

No more easy money = no more engineering for engineering’s sake, and companies are increasingly becoming more privy to the fact that architecture astronauts are a liability, and cloud is a 95% distractions meant to absorb time energy and money from IT orgs within large companies.

I’ve personally switched out of devops and to a domain aligned software team within my company. I am absolutely fed up with how wasteful and distracting the state of devops is to the actual business.

[throwaway31131]

> no more engineering for engineering’s sake

I'm not sure many successful engineering orgs did much of that but also the environment our creations live in is much different now.

It was a huge task just to get our programs to run at all not very long ago. When I first started coding I was working on some code for a VLSI problem and I spent like a month just figuring out how to get the problem to fit on disk (not main memory, but on disk!). Now there are similar things that run on a laptop [0]. And it's not like I'm unique in having to come up with crazy solutions to problems tangent to the primary problem in this space. [1]

Now the infrastructure for our code is amazing and the machines that execute them abound in resources, especially in the cloud. Now that the yoke has been cast off it makes sense more time is spent on the solution the actual problem you set out to solve in the first place.

[0] https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenLane [1] How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54

[anonyfox]

I don't know, my own DevOps practises evolve around straightforward shell/go/js snippets that try to enforce the absolute bare reasonable minimum of infrastructure as cheap as possible, but with scaling paths laid bare if needed ever. sometimes a few lambdas/workers+CDN solve problems for essentially zero cost, sometimes people are amazed how far a single VPS can carry them nowadays. Or how fast SQLite can be. DevOps is about the art of shipping value to customers as fast as possible, at scale, with minimum cost (but not being the developer itself usually). With continuous improvement loops. But I can count on a single hand how often I actually needed to "scale up" something so hard I needed full on data migrations and all.

Small, sharp tools, my friend.