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You say you don't want to understand infrastructure and just want a button that magically deploys your app, yet in the same breath you complain that devops folk

You say you don't want to understand infrastructure and just want a button that magically deploys your app, yet in the same breath you complain that devops folks are "working on infrastructure and platform development for it's own sake". These are contradictory sentiments. "Leaking" infrastructure details to developers is actually less work for them because they are deferring the finer details of the app deployment to the developers who made it. Your request for a magic button that doesn't require you to understand anything about infrastructure is exactly why we have so much complexity.

jackpeterfletch 3y ago
I agree that you never escape the requirement to have knowledge of how your application is deployed. Things like autoscaling, security, performance etc, all intrinsically effect how you actually write your application. I think there's a broader point though, in that very often, infra teams will pursue solutions that solve problems in the perspective of their own lens and interests without good oversight from the broader organisation, for developer experience, and economies of scale. I've seen and worked in environments at both ends of that scale and the gap in dev-ex, and agility as a result can be absolutely staggering. So often its to avoid 'vendor lock-in', only for infra teams to become the 'vendor', its complex, so they grow by necessity to be expensive, but then still lack the resources to be able provide a clean experience that can be easily migrated off of, resulting in lock-in. As a dev, the cost isn't my concern, but whats frustrating is knowing that its possible to deploy a new service, with all the bells and whistles, in an hour, and being unable to.
osigurdson 3y ago
Those pesky details like cache line misses and inter node latencies should just go away. I am far too important to know about such realities. Why should I care about cores or processor architecture, I should just be able to write my code and something should figure out the details. If you agree with the above statement, please go into management.
baq 3y ago
The problem in complex, large infrastructures is I know exactly what I need to do and have no idea how to even get started. There are no obvious entry points, there are layers upon layers of abstractions to make developing IaC easy for those who maintain it but they reduce comprehensibility to almost zero. My most recent example: deploy a lambda function. Building the image: 1 day. Deploying it to prod: 2 weeks.

jackpeterfletch 3y ago

I agree that you never escape the requirement to have knowledge of how your application is deployed. Things like autoscaling, security, performance etc, all intrinsically effect how you actually write your application. I think there's a broader point though, in that very often, infra teams will pursue solutions that solve problems in the perspective of their own lens and interests without good oversight from the broader organisation, for developer experience, and economies of scale. I've seen and worked in environments at both ends of that scale and the gap in dev-ex, and agility as a result can be absolutely staggering. So often its to avoid 'vendor lock-in', only for infra teams to become the 'vendor', its complex, so they grow by necessity to be expensive, but then still lack the resources to be able provide a clean experience that can be easily migrated off of, resulting in lock-in. As a dev, the cost isn't my concern, but whats frustrating is knowing that its possible to deploy a new service, with all the bells and whistles, in an hour, and being unable to.

osigurdson 3y ago

Those pesky details like cache line misses and inter node latencies should just go away. I am far too important to know about such realities. Why should I care about cores or processor architecture, I should just be able to write my code and something should figure out the details. If you agree with the above statement, please go into management.

baq 3y ago

The problem in complex, large infrastructures is I know exactly what I need to do and have no idea how to even get started. There are no obvious entry points, there are layers upon layers of abstractions to make developing IaC easy for those who maintain it but they reduce comprehensibility to almost zero. My most recent example: deploy a lambda function. Building the image: 1 day. Deploying it to prod: 2 weeks.