Thank you for taking the time to answer. You sound like a good rational engineer. Things that work don't need unnecessary splash of coolness.
On my previous job, I had been working for 15 years on the development of a complex business system. It included desktop apps, mobile apps, webs, on-premises and clouds. Throughout the years, we have introduced many then cutting-edge technologies for new products within the system. Some technologies before they were cool. But, the fine-working-already-done products, we kept supporting with the original technology for the lifetime of the product.
The point is that many new tools and technologies bring a very limited value to the finished working products.
Now, I am a maker of the new development tools. So, I am eager to push them to the world, but wouldn't like to be perceived as an "architecture astronaut". Your opinion helps in understanding how and why engineers choose new tools and technologies.
I am curious to know how you evaluate a new development product in respect to the ROI? What characteristics should a product have to satisfy your criteria for considering it?
35 years ago, that same question was asked, but in a different context. It was thought that when there are BASIC and spreadsheets there is no need to do any more serious coding.
Even more so 25 years ago when various GUIs became ubiquitous.
About 20 years ago, Flash and Dreamweaver were promising the same.
I tend to agree with the author of the article. Somewhere along the way, term devops changed its meaning. Initially, devops symbolized a way of working and a multi-disciplinary team. Nicely captured in [1]:
> Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed. Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.
Today, devops is often used to describe the engineering role very similar to the classic system administrator. I guess this is mostly because it sounds "more modern" and it's more attractive.
But, the comments in this thread made me aware that there indeed is a role that's focused only on serving developer needs. I guess we could call an engineer a devops engineer if their job is only to build and maintain system tools for developers.
I have an anecdote. Back then when I was studying CS on the exam for computer architecture class, we got a problem to solve: "Define the instruction set for your imaginary CPU and then use it to write a program for managing an elevator."
They expected us to imagine a simple instruction set with 7-10 commands. But one clever guy wrote this: "My CPU has only one instruction - manage_elevator. The code for elevator management is: "manage_elevator". He passed with A.
I guess that is how a non-programmer would imagine a programming language.
AWS isn't a developer tools company. It is ops tools company. In particular enterprise ops tools company. Their customers are IT managers and system administrators from large companies. That explains 1 and 2.
Famously, AWS is organized as huge bunch of two pizza teams. Essentially, it's a huge incubator for internal startups. That's how they manage to churn out new features so frequently and try out and discard unsuccessful products. Also, that is why their tools looks so damn inconsistent and why you never know what's working with what.
Regardless of money, they can't make the tools better without sacrificing something. And that is a space for competitors. Work on developer centric tools for small and medium sized companies.
Back when I was studying CS in the early 90s, it wasn't obvious at all that I am going to work with a DB anytime in my career. I loved the subject, I passed with A*. But I thought I am not going to see it later, because I didn't plan to work for a bank or some large enterprise.
Then, in about two years, everything changed. Suddenly, every new web project (and web was also novel) included a MySQL DB. That's when the idea about the three tier architecture was born. And since then, a few generations of engineers have been raised that can't think of a computer system without a central DB.
I'm telling this because in microservices I see the opportunity to rethink that concept. I've built and run some microservices based systems and the biggest benefit wasn't technical, but organizational. Once, the system was split into small services, each with its own permanent storage (when needed) of any kind, that freed the teams to develop and publish code on their own. As long as they respected communication interfaces between teams, everything worked.
Of course, you have to drop, or at least weaken, some of ACID requirements. Sometimes, that means modifying a business rule. For example, you can rely on eventual consistency instead of hard consistency, or replenishing the data from external sources instead of durability.
Otherwise, I agree with the author that if you are starting alone or in a small team, it's best to start with a monolith. With time, as the team gets bigger and the system becomes more complex, your initial monolith will become just another microservice.
I also started with ZX81. For a while, I didn't have a cable for tape recorder. A couple of magazines came with my ZX. Inside, there were some listings of games in BASIC. So, to play a game, a had to retype the code every time I restarted the computer. After a while, I started changing the code to see what will happen.
Thanks. That's exactly the kind of answer I'd hope I would get. Precise and actionable.
Admittedly, I'm a fan of serverless. I believe serverless will soon become a dominant form of cloud computing. I think it is just a matter of immaturity of the platforms and lack of tools. While I can't do much about the platforms, I can try to build better tools.
That’s exactly the pain I felt. And that is what I am solving.
Every complex project starts as a simple one. I am trying to make them very easy to configure and launch.
Yes, Python is easier as it doesn't need compiling. So, you can just copy-paste it to the Console. Yet, there's a lot to be wished. Like instant log access, handling multiple stages (dev, integration, production, demo) etc.
I think Lambdas can be, or better, soon will be suitable for almost all use cases. We are just missing proper tools and good design patterns. Those must to be opinionated.
Constantly asking myself “do I really need to do that”? You should always keep the focus on what do you ultimately want to achieve with the code you are writing. Most effective developers I’ve met mercilessly cut on what they spend their time.
On my previous job, I had been working for 15 years on the development of a complex business system. It included desktop apps, mobile apps, webs, on-premises and clouds. Throughout the years, we have introduced many then cutting-edge technologies for new products within the system. Some technologies before they were cool. But, the fine-working-already-done products, we kept supporting with the original technology for the lifetime of the product.
The point is that many new tools and technologies bring a very limited value to the finished working products.
Now, I am a maker of the new development tools. So, I am eager to push them to the world, but wouldn't like to be perceived as an "architecture astronaut". Your opinion helps in understanding how and why engineers choose new tools and technologies.