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That's really interesting, thanks for sharing. I did not have the pleasure(?) of working in the industry back then, as is true of most developers these days. D

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing. I did not have the pleasure(?) of working in the industry back then, as is true of most developers these days. Do you hold out hope for a similar transition to a better local development workflow? What do you think it might look like?

jiggawatts 5y ago
The major cloud vendors have a vested interest to the tune of trillions of dollars for ensuring lock-in. All the cloud vendors want to become the next IBM, except this time with recurring revenue instead of one-time sales, something IBM never succeeded at despite trying very hard. Openness, standardisation, commoditisation, and low-tier equivalent offerings are an anathema to the vision of these mega-corps. They will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. Look at what Microsoft is doing: Instead of moving Azure features down to their IDEs, they are moving their IDE into the cloud! VS Code is Electron-based, which is to say it is just a local web server plus a web browser shell. It's not rocket science to move the server component into the cloud, and have the standard customer web browser be the front-end. I've noticed recently that this has started to happen. There's already a SQL query editor based on VS Code, and there's editors popping up for App Service and I think Functions also (equivalent to AWS Lambda). This is the ultimate lock-in, where you develop "on" the platform directly, and have no hope of ever reproducing any part of it locally: the build system, the debugger, source control, tracing tools, or the IDE itself. Other people in this thread mentioned local Kubernetes development flows. They're too busy drinking the Kool-aid. The cloud vendors are not interested in ever making this a long-term viable option and will find creative ways of making such open development practices non-tenable.
zerubeus 5y ago
There's already good projects doing it check the https://serverless-stack.com/ https://serverless-stack.com/

jiggawatts 5y ago

The major cloud vendors have a vested interest to the tune of trillions of dollars for ensuring lock-in. All the cloud vendors want to become the next IBM, except this time with recurring revenue instead of one-time sales, something IBM never succeeded at despite trying very hard. Openness, standardisation, commoditisation, and low-tier equivalent offerings are an anathema to the vision of these mega-corps. They will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. Look at what Microsoft is doing: Instead of moving Azure features down to their IDEs, they are moving their IDE into the cloud! VS Code is Electron-based, which is to say it is just a local web server plus a web browser shell. It's not rocket science to move the server component into the cloud, and have the standard customer web browser be the front-end. I've noticed recently that this has started to happen. There's already a SQL query editor based on VS Code, and there's editors popping up for App Service and I think Functions also (equivalent to AWS Lambda). This is the ultimate lock-in, where you develop "on" the platform directly, and have no hope of ever reproducing any part of it locally: the build system, the debugger, source control, tracing tools, or the IDE itself. Other people in this thread mentioned local Kubernetes development flows. They're too busy drinking the Kool-aid. The cloud vendors are not interested in ever making this a long-term viable option and will find creative ways of making such open development practices non-tenable.

zerubeus 5y ago

There's already good projects doing it check the https://serverless-stack.com/ https://serverless-stack.com/