> What I mean by "programming the machine" is doing technical tasks that relates to making the cloud work in the way you want. I take a different perspective.

> What I mean by "programming the machine" is doing technical tasks that relates to making the cloud work in the way you want. I take a different perspective. When using a cloud, i need to design my application to work within my selected clouds constraints. A lot of the extra work then comes down to if using a cloud, not just a single VPS on a cloud provider, you are dealing with distributed computing and have to deal with all the issues of distributed computing. Consensus, error handling, etc. I agree though, more often than not it's a lot of extra work but mostly due to dealing with distributed architecture/designing for being cost effective. On personal projects I find designing to be cost effective has me jumping through a lot of hoops and doing novel things. It means I can run multi-region apps with performance better than most webapps for cents/dollars. The equivalent apps I work on in my day job can be costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars as they don't jump through the hoops I do. "It's not worth it", "let's look at it later", "we'll just do this, it's good enough for now". As it's someone else's money i just think "meh" and move on as isn't my fight when the majority of people don't want to do it.