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I think you completely miss the point. With cloud tooling, my team is unblocked to spin up the resources we need, manage CI / CD in our unique way that solves o

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I think you completely miss the point. With cloud tooling, my team is unblocked to spin up the resources we need, manage CI / CD in our unique way that solves our problems, quickly try out serverless if it’s a good model for a given use case, change logging or alerting, get new compute resources like GPUs, etc., all without being blocked by a choke point of in house engineering limitations and staffing limitations and political in-fighting over who owns what and who gets to define how abstract vs purpose-specific the tooling will be. You toss out “build a good CI/CD pipeline” like that’s just some localized, solvable problem, and it’s exactly that lack of imagination and lack of understanding about the true multitude of use cases that causes this problem in the first place. I agree “serverless” isn’t a panopoly solution to everything, but externalizing and democratizing all infra tools to cloud vendors is a major transformative solution that is worth a lot of money and solves a lot of problems. For example, if someone like you had any leadership influence in my company’s infra org, I’d be trying to spend money on cloud tools just to get away from your authority as fast as I could, and I would be 1000% correct to feel that way and would end up with much healthier tool solutions and less blockages on use-case-specific delivery requirements by doing a giant spin move around your myopic perspective.

twh270 6y ago
This has nothing to do with technology or tooling, this is your team having the autonomy to do what works for you. At my current client, my team is dependent on the "Platform Team" for _everything_ that isn't directly related to the code we're writing. Do we need a new Azure queue? That's a Platform ticket in JIRA. Do we need a new tool in our CI/CD pipeline? That's a Platform ticket in JIRA. Do we have a build failing for something other than tests? That's a Platform ticket in JIRA. Do we have an issue in production? We need to engage with Cloud Ops because we don't have access to anything in prod. Plus, it takes six weeks to get a feature from development to production because horrible workflow and manual processes. Plus, development teams are prevented from implementing anything without the approval of Solution Architects who are too far removed from the business to understand what's needed and too far removed from the technology to be able to design a working solution. It's all fucking horrible, and yet we're using all the modern cloud tooling: Spring Boot, Azure, containers, K8S, Gitlab pipelines. In contrast, a couple clients ago my team had full autonomy to do what we believed was the right solution. Stories would often be groomed, implemented, and delivered into production all within a 2-week sprint. No muss no fuss. When they weren't, it was normally due to us having to wait on another team to deliver their work.

twh270 6y ago

This has nothing to do with technology or tooling, this is your team having the autonomy to do what works for you. At my current client, my team is dependent on the "Platform Team" for _everything_ that isn't directly related to the code we're writing. Do we need a new Azure queue? That's a Platform ticket in JIRA. Do we need a new tool in our CI/CD pipeline? That's a Platform ticket in JIRA. Do we have a build failing for something other than tests? That's a Platform ticket in JIRA. Do we have an issue in production? We need to engage with Cloud Ops because we don't have access to anything in prod. Plus, it takes six weeks to get a feature from development to production because horrible workflow and manual processes. Plus, development teams are prevented from implementing anything without the approval of Solution Architects who are too far removed from the business to understand what's needed and too far removed from the technology to be able to design a working solution. It's all fucking horrible, and yet we're using all the modern cloud tooling: Spring Boot, Azure, containers, K8S, Gitlab pipelines. In contrast, a couple clients ago my team had full autonomy to do what we believed was the right solution. Stories would often be groomed, implemented, and delivered into production all within a 2-week sprint. No muss no fuss. When they weren't, it was normally due to us having to wait on another team to deliver their work.