> We have no dedicated devops person and much of that work falls on me and other people who would be better writing code. I think the cloud paradigm is experiencing a shift.
Part of that shift is that prior to the cloud, the development environment and production environments were very similar. By that I mean if a programmer could set up his debian / redhat laptop from the command line, then it wasn't a big jump to set up a server running debian / redhat in a production environment.
But no one in their right mind runs k8s on their laptop just to support VSCode and a compiler. Worse they could not run AWS/GCP because they are proprietary, insanely large, complex and forever changing. I'm pretty sure becoming an expert engineer in those environments is a full time job. The end result is a new class of engineers have arisen that look after the production side, and the developers just throw their code over the wall once it's tested.
I'm sure the cloud providers love this, as they have created a cohort of engineers that have invested years in learning their product, now have their wages dependent on that product being used within their organisation, and a total monopoly over that product because it can never be reproduced by anyone else. But for the industry as a whole, it looks to be a backward step. Once the problem expands beyond what a single human mind can cope with, you need teams. The communication overhead of a team means they don't have a hope of being as productive as a single person.
The share amount of complexity introduced by these proprietary cloud frameworks looks to be unnecessary. Most of it smells like technical debit created by organic growth together with an insistence on backward compatibility (don't want to give those locked in customers an excuse to move). And desktop OS's are (Debian / Windows / ...) are insecure by design, at least when compared to their phone brethren. And, their phone brethren look somewhat like cloud designs now, Phones have isolated apps with private data areas. The apps communicate via channels provided by the OS, and the availability of those channels is controlled by permissions assigned by the user. In the cloud we isolated things for performance as they could run on distance machines, whereas in a personal device we did it for security. But the end result looks similar.
So maybe one day we will end up where we started, with a developer environment looking like the cloud we deploy too. I fear I'm too old to experience if / when it does happen, but it does seem like something we should aspire to.
Part of that shift is that prior to the cloud, the development environment and production environments were very similar. By that I mean if a programmer could set up his debian / redhat laptop from the command line, then it wasn't a big jump to set up a server running debian / redhat in a production environment.
But no one in their right mind runs k8s on their laptop just to support VSCode and a compiler. Worse they could not run AWS/GCP because they are proprietary, insanely large, complex and forever changing. I'm pretty sure becoming an expert engineer in those environments is a full time job. The end result is a new class of engineers have arisen that look after the production side, and the developers just throw their code over the wall once it's tested.
I'm sure the cloud providers love this, as they have created a cohort of engineers that have invested years in learning their product, now have their wages dependent on that product being used within their organisation, and a total monopoly over that product because it can never be reproduced by anyone else. But for the industry as a whole, it looks to be a backward step. Once the problem expands beyond what a single human mind can cope with, you need teams. The communication overhead of a team means they don't have a hope of being as productive as a single person.
The share amount of complexity introduced by these proprietary cloud frameworks looks to be unnecessary. Most of it smells like technical debit created by organic growth together with an insistence on backward compatibility (don't want to give those locked in customers an excuse to move). And desktop OS's are (Debian / Windows / ...) are insecure by design, at least when compared to their phone brethren. And, their phone brethren look somewhat like cloud designs now, Phones have isolated apps with private data areas. The apps communicate via channels provided by the OS, and the availability of those channels is controlled by permissions assigned by the user. In the cloud we isolated things for performance as they could run on distance machines, whereas in a personal device we did it for security. But the end result looks similar.
So maybe one day we will end up where we started, with a developer environment looking like the cloud we deploy too. I fear I'm too old to experience if / when it does happen, but it does seem like something we should aspire to.