> Because interfacing via API is expensive. Writing APIs for others to use productively isn't easy and change management also adds a lot of overhead. An under

> Because interfacing via API is expensive. Writing APIs for others to use productively isn't easy and change management also adds a lot of overhead. An under appreciated point. Something that is affordable for giant monopoly profit driven FAANGs, but harder in smaller orgs. Even within my team, the "level of difficulty" of writing an API depends on its user base. If I am the primary user, it's easy. There's one really sharp kind on my team, if he is going to use it, then 2x the difficulty. If I need it to handle the median dev on my team, then 2x again. By the time you get to the below median dev, add another 2x. So even within my team, the intended user base can change the difficult from 1x->8x. What are some of the pain points - input validation that drives useful informative errors, flexibility on inputs like having sensible defaults to reduce the number of inputs users must pass, performance/scaling, and edge cases. >> In this sense, development teams weren’t so much empowered to deliver software faster; rather, they were over-encumbered with infrastructure tasks that were outside of their expertise. And agreed on this point. Amusingly I have had HN thread arguments just this week with DevOps advocates telling me that akshully their job isn't to empower devs, but some sort of "tail that wags that dog" interpretation around devops organizational / standardization / cost / etc.