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> Is cloud administration less time consuming than system administration? Infinitely, and if you look at it from a startup lens it only makes sense. One needs

> Is cloud administration less time consuming than system administration? Infinitely, and if you look at it from a startup lens it only makes sense. One needs to point only at the recent log4j incident. This is obviously a gigantic black swan event, but even just ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig. There is absolutely no substitution for being able to ship code to a platform that just runs it and scales it for you. Andy Jassey had a great slide a few years back at Reinvent, when talking about Lambda -- "in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic". If you really think about that: how many times have you had to write some kind of database sharding logic, or cache invalidation, or maintaining encrypted environment variables, whatever. That idea that you can toss that -- and what that gives to teams, not having to spend massive timesinks and budgets and hiring and all of that on -- effectively -- solved problems, you really start to understand how you can move faster.

demosito666 5y ago
> in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic The present reality of Lambda is quite different though. Even though the code of the function itself is more or less "business logic" (although this is a really meaningless term when we're talking about known programming languages and computers), the scaffolding around it with Terraform/CloudFormation/Serverless/etc. is substantial, riddled with quirks and is really time-consuming to figure out and update. I don't think I spend less time on this accidental complexity now when we have most of our logic in Lambda, compared to the times when we were just running Flask apps in a VM. This is not to mention how hard one has to fight to overcome the limitations of the runtime, e.g. adding some "warmers" scripts to reduce cold-start latency (no, provisioned concurrency doesn't help and is ridiculously expensive). And then comes the bill after you accidentally created invocation loop between two functions.
- mark242 5y ago
  Of course -- you're still writing code to delete a key in Elasticache within your lambda. You're writing yaml code for deployments. Hence the "in the future" portion of this slide. The scale-to-X and scale-to-zero features of Lambda, along with the guaranteed interface to your lambda with predictable input and output requirements, is incredibly empowering for an engineering team. I can absolutely guarantee that we have spent far, far, far less time maintaining our infrastructure than what we would need to be doing if we had a big-buncha-EC2 setup. Imagine that the environment issues get taken care of, because Amazon has teams and teams and teams of engineers who are working on just that. Cloudflare has the zero-cold-start isolates. All these platforms are heavily invested in making your development and deployment experience as easy as it can be. Concentrate on writing your code, and you'll reap the benefits.
tormeh 5y ago
> ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig That's just a cronjob. I know some people don't like doing it that way, but that's on them. I've seen this work for years in production with minimal trouble.
- christophilus 5y ago
  It’s not even a cron job. It’s a single apt install.
  - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
    log4j was different because each proprietary vendor has their own prepackaged version of it for some reason. Even SAN software or VMware. Still, the mitigation was like 4 hours to hunt and disable, and 2 more hours when a full patch came around. Not too difficult. It was only time consuming for those who worked in Cloud providers where all this crap is centralized and understaffed. In real world scenarios there were tons of teams completely unaffected.
daveevad 5y ago
> in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic How much business logic is there across all businesses? I'm aware of a joke at Google about how it could reduce 90% of the employees without any impact on the business.
- oblio 5y ago
  > How much business logic is there across all businesses? Immensely more than tech logic, that's for sure. Just implementing and updating something like a single country's tax code produces more lines of code than the entire Linux kernel, that devs like to brag about :-)
- Lamad123 5y ago
  The remaining useful 10% probably only does the "mundane" server administration that nobody wants to do!
ihateolives 5y ago
> but even just ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig Oh boy, if that's what your server admin guys told you before you went full cloud then I'm sorry, I've got some bad news for you.
- ozim 5y ago
  Take a look at January security patches from Microsoft and how domain controllers had bunch of issues and people had to uninstall patch.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Yeah, all those people saying that server management takes little time (me included) are explicitly not talking about Windows. If you want to offshore all of your Windows servers, all I can say is "go for it!"

demosito666 5y ago

> in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic The present reality of Lambda is quite different though. Even though the code of the function itself is more or less "business logic" (although this is a really meaningless term when we're talking about known programming languages and computers), the scaffolding around it with Terraform/CloudFormation/Serverless/etc. is substantial, riddled with quirks and is really time-consuming to figure out and update. I don't think I spend less time on this accidental complexity now when we have most of our logic in Lambda, compared to the times when we were just running Flask apps in a VM. This is not to mention how hard one has to fight to overcome the limitations of the runtime, e.g. adding some "warmers" scripts to reduce cold-start latency (no, provisioned concurrency doesn't help and is ridiculously expensive). And then comes the bill after you accidentally created invocation loop between two functions.

mark242 5y ago
Of course -- you're still writing code to delete a key in Elasticache within your lambda. You're writing yaml code for deployments. Hence the "in the future" portion of this slide. The scale-to-X and scale-to-zero features of Lambda, along with the guaranteed interface to your lambda with predictable input and output requirements, is incredibly empowering for an engineering team. I can absolutely guarantee that we have spent far, far, far less time maintaining our infrastructure than what we would need to be doing if we had a big-buncha-EC2 setup. Imagine that the environment issues get taken care of, because Amazon has teams and teams and teams of engineers who are working on just that. Cloudflare has the zero-cold-start isolates. All these platforms are heavily invested in making your development and deployment experience as easy as it can be. Concentrate on writing your code, and you'll reap the benefits.

tormeh 5y ago

> ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig That's just a cronjob. I know some people don't like doing it that way, but that's on them. I've seen this work for years in production with minimal trouble.

christophilus 5y ago
It’s not even a cron job. It’s a single apt install.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  log4j was different because each proprietary vendor has their own prepackaged version of it for some reason. Even SAN software or VMware. Still, the mitigation was like 4 hours to hunt and disable, and 2 more hours when a full patch came around. Not too difficult. It was only time consuming for those who worked in Cloud providers where all this crap is centralized and understaffed. In real world scenarios there were tons of teams completely unaffected.

daveevad 5y ago

> in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic How much business logic is there across all businesses? I'm aware of a joke at Google about how it could reduce 90% of the employees without any impact on the business.

oblio 5y ago
> How much business logic is there across all businesses? Immensely more than tech logic, that's for sure. Just implementing and updating something like a single country's tax code produces more lines of code than the entire Linux kernel, that devs like to brag about :-)
Lamad123 5y ago
The remaining useful 10% probably only does the "mundane" server administration that nobody wants to do!

ihateolives 5y ago

> but even just ongoing security patching at the OS level can be a full-time gig Oh boy, if that's what your server admin guys told you before you went full cloud then I'm sorry, I've got some bad news for you.

ozim 5y ago
Take a look at January security patches from Microsoft and how domain controllers had bunch of issues and people had to uninstall patch.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Yeah, all those people saying that server management takes little time (me included) are explicitly not talking about Windows. If you want to offshore all of your Windows servers, all I can say is "go for it!"