Good points. On the cloud lock-in, it is important to keep in mind that the companies offering that want to lock you in. The article mentions but I think it ne

Good points. On the cloud lock-in, it is important to keep in mind that the companies offering that want to lock you in. The article mentions but I think it needs to be emphasized. They are not passive agents but more like really sophisticad drug dealers who study addiction and know how to profit from it. "Hey, psst look you get a 6 month free trial, just give this a try it costs nothing...". But cloud providers started to compete with each other harder. As part of that many are lowering costs and open sourcing cloud orchestration tools which 10 years ago was the super secret sauce. Article covers this a bit as well and I noticed it too. Running your own cloud on bare metal is becoming more viable. AWS might be good today, but Google wants your business as well, and Kubernetes and some bare metal provider might save serious money in the future. As for HN driven development, yeah I have seen a couple projects ruined switching from Python to Go (during last few years there was a story like that every week on HN). It wasn't that Go was bad, it is just that it destabilized an existing product without delivering enough benefits. > One key emerging type of tool Freedman advises looking into implementing is a ‘distributed tracing’ system, often modeled after Google’s “Dapper” system. The secret sauce for me is using Erlang (Elixir works as well). Sometimes it feels like cheating as in "this shouldn't be that easy": distributed tracing, hotpatching to add a log statement while everything is up running, or restarting small parts of the service. Imagine say C++ being able to confidently run gdb on a process, kill a thread, reload new code, let the thread restart without fear of causing some memory corrupt or leaving a lock acquired. Like the article said, you can do that with many tools, but having it be solid, and built it is a huge advantage. Money-wise it just means having less people and less ops pain. Because if there is one thing that's right up there with infrastructure costs, it's people's time.