"don't you think we've complicated the stack and it's harder to operate"@brendandburns shakes his head no@alicegoldfuss "yes"

Going to side with ops here.

— jessie frazelle (@jessfraz) October 1, 2018

Even though I think the whole DevOps trend is kind of laughable, I agree with this.

I’ve heard, “Ah, the cloud, we won’t even need system administrators, designers, architects, none of that, any more!”

And all of that is completely false. Any cloud project is about 10x more complicated than anything done on site. It’s much more complex, security is much harder, documentation on how to achieve anything is usually worse, and the performance is actually more unpredictable.

The cloud (terrible name, but eh) does solve some problems, don’t get me wrong. A few years ago, I was able to get the small company where I’m now the CTO up and running with a working application in a day, essentially. Back in the old days, that would’ve taken 2-3 weeks, bare minimum, if doing it from scratch.

Yes, you can run with fewer staff once all is spooled up. But the actual operation and design and all the rest is much harder than it was back in the 1990s and 2000s, which is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about cognitive inequality a lot lately. One could simply be a worse IT person and get by in that era. Now, you must have a wider range of skills and simply be smarter to stay in the same place. This is happening to many, many jobs all at once.

It’s not surprising that the pure developer of the group answered “no.” People like me and Alice conceal and obfuscate the complexity of cloud operations from developers, and this makes their lives easier. That’s our job. Doing this effectively means that the developers think their daily tasks are far more effortless and seamless now than before. That’s their truth. But like a duck swimming, there’s a whole lot happening below the water with cloud that developers just don’t see.