Is it just me or is the cloud era of developer tooling fundamentally weird? It seems like there used to be this tacit assumption that a good tool is one that st

Is it just me or is the cloud era of developer tooling fundamentally weird? It seems like there used to be this tacit assumption that a good tool is one that starts small with you and grows as your needs grow. How do I log in to a remote machine? ssh. How do I log in to hundreds of remote machines? ssh. How do I reverse tunnel my local webserver through a firewall that only allows HTTPs traffic? ssh. Of course, there were always systems that asked a lot from you before they gave anything back. I think everyone's first experience of SQL was probably "what?" followed by "no, really, what?" Kneel at the altar of the cartesian product, my child, that you may be reborn into the kingdom of relational algebra. But, hey, if apostasy is your bag there's still nothing stopping you from putting all your data in one big table. If you're good enough at it you might even snag a job at Google. But the Dockerverse is really something else. No shade on the technology – it's really cool stuff – but boy does it love to tell you how big and complex your problems are. You want to build images on one machine and run them on another? Sounds like what you really need is a Secure Container Registry! Want to have services with dependencies? Forget init^H^H^H^Hsystemd, try Docker Compose! Just kidding, I mean Docker Swarm! Just kidding, I mean Kubernetes! Actually you kind of want all of them maybe! I don't think this is a weakness of the software itself; you can find simple ways to use containers if you try hard enough. But that difficulty really speaks to the motivations of the cloud services industry. Using Docker for simple problems is asking a car salesman for whatever will get you from A to B. Hey, buddy, you don't know what you're missing. Everyone thinks they want something simple until they see our amazing upgrade options. And what about safety? Think about what would happen to your family if you were caught in a tragic Byzantine Fault. And, yes, absolutely, if you have Big Cloud Problems, the cost of finding the right cloud-native service discovery mesh is near-zero when amortised over thousands of servers worth of existential dread. But I just can't help but feel like I'm preparing for cloud scale like I'm preparing for a zombie apocalypse. It's an interesting problem space, and a great excuse to hang out on the tactical flashlight subreddit, but I'm not sure these tomorrow solutions actually help me with my today problems. The people selling the gear sure are doing well, though.