3 ms·

The truth is, though, that aws and the other cloud providers that have more than hosted storage and compute, are building their own “operating system” to build

The truth is, though, that aws and the other cloud providers that have more than hosted storage and compute, are building their own “operating system” to build these systems. We Unix graybeards may be used to xargs, grep and wget. The next generation of developers are learning how to construct pipelines from step functions, sqs, lambda and s3 instead. And coming as someone who really enjoys Unix tooling, the systems designed with these new paradigms will be more scalable, observable and maintainable than the shell scripts of yore.

zmgsabst 4y ago
Well, yeah. I think cloud gets much maligned — but all the serious discussions with, eg, AWS employees work from this paradigm: - AWS is a “global computer” which you lease slices of - there is access to the raw computer (EC2, networking tools, etc) - there are basic constructs on top of that (SQS, Lambda, CloudWatch, etc) - there are language wrappers to allocate those for your services (CDK, Pulumi, etc) …and you end up with something that looks surprisingly like a “program” which runs on that “global computer”. I know that it wasn’t always like that — plenty of sharp edges when I first used it in 2014. But we came to that paradigm precisely because people asked “how can we apply what we already know?” About mainframes. About Erlang. About operating systems. I think it’s important to know the Unix tools, but I also think that early cloud phase has blinded a lot of people to what the cloud is now. All the crawler needs to be is a quick crawler script, a Typescript definition of resources, and you get all the AWS benefits in two files. Maybe not “ten lines of Bash” easy, but we’re talking “thirty lines total, with logging, retries, persistence, etc”.

3 ms·

The truth is, though, that aws and the other cloud providers that have more than hosted storage and compute, are building their own “operating system” to build

by ipython 4y ago

zmgsabst 4y ago
Well, yeah. I think cloud gets much maligned — but all the serious discussions with, eg, AWS employees work from this paradigm: - AWS is a “global computer” which you lease slices of - there is access to the raw computer (EC2, networking tools, etc) - there are basic constructs on top of that (SQS, Lambda, CloudWatch, etc) - there are language wrappers to allocate those for your services (CDK, Pulumi, etc) …and you end up with something that looks surprisingly like a “program” which runs on that “global computer”. I know that it wasn’t always like that — plenty of sharp edges when I first used it in 2014. But we came to that paradigm precisely because people asked “how can we apply what we already know?” About mainframes. About Erlang. About operating systems. I think it’s important to know the Unix tools, but I also think that early cloud phase has blinded a lot of people to what the cloud is now. All the crawler needs to be is a quick crawler script, a Typescript definition of resources, and you get all the AWS benefits in two files. Maybe not “ten lines of Bash” easy, but we’re talking “thirty lines total, with logging, retries, persistence, etc”.