Have you ever asked the business folks or your investors did they care about your “levels of abstraction”? What looks better on your review? I created a facade over our messaging system or I implemented this feature that brought in revenue/increased customer retention/got us closer to the upper right quadrant of Gartner’s magic square?
Why should they care, or even be in the loop for such a decision?
You don’t ask your real estate agent on advice for fixing you electrical system I guess?
Of course your business folks care whether you are spending time adding business value and helping them make money.
I’ve had to explain to a CTO before why I had my team spending time on a CI/CD pipeline. Even now that I have a CTO whose idea of “writing requirements” is throwing together a Python proof of concept script and playing with Athena (writing Sql against a large CSV file stored in S3), I still better be able to articulate business value for any technological tangents I am going on.
Sure. Agree totally, maybe I misread your previous comment a bit.
What I meant is that run-of-the-mill business folks do not necessarily know how business value is created in terms of code and architecture.
I don't know of any business where they wouldn't be involved. Not in the "Let's talk directly about implementation details" way, but in the "Driving product development and roadmap" and "ascertaining value to our customers" way.
Any time spent on work that doesn't directly create value for customers is work that the business should be weighing in on. I'm not saying that you should never spend any time doing anything else - but these are trade offs that the product manager should be involved in, and one of their primary jobs is being able to weight the technical and business realities and figuring out where resources should be going.
> and that it requires virtually no effort to avoid it
Of course it requires effort. A lot of effort, not to mention headcount. The entire value of cloud-managed services is what it saves you vs. the trade-off's, and it's disingenuous to pretend that's not the case.
Sorry, I don't agree, and I feel like I provided evidence why in my first post. To summarize, choosing services like Postgres and S3 doesn't lock you in. SQS and SNS might, but I think it's an exaggerated cost, and that has nothing to do with Lambdas (EC2 instances are just as likely to use SQS or SNS - moreso, given that SQS wasn't supported for Lambdas until recently).
There are tradeoffs, of course. Cost at scale is the really big one - at some point it's cheaper to bring ops/ hardware in-house.
I just don't agree that lock-in is a huge issue, and I really disagree with the idea that lambdas make lock-in harder.
There's a big difference between AWS RDS and self-managed. Huge difference.
- DBA's & DevOps
- Procurement management & spare parts
- Colocation w/multihoming
- Leasing agreements
- Paying for power usage
- Disaster recovery plan
- CapEx & depreciation
- Uncomfortable meetings with my CFO explaining why things are expensive
- Hardware failure
- Scaling up/out
Not even worth going on because the point is obvious. Going "all in" reduces cost and allows more time to be focused on revenue-generating work. The "migration" boogeyman is just that, something we tell other programmers to scare them around the campfire. You're going to be hard-pressed finding horror stories of companies in "cloud lock-in" that isn't a consultant trying to sell you something.
> at some point it's cheaper to bring ops/ hardware in-house.
It depends. It's not always scale issue, and with all things it starts with a model and collaboration with your finance team.
While I could probably answer that, I don't think it's relevant to my central point - that lock-in is not as big of a deal as it's portrayed as, and that lambdas do not make the problem considerably worse.
That’s an incredibly ignorant and misleading statement. It’s sort of like saying a database isn’t valuable because 99.999% of requests hit the cache, and not the disk.
Everything was built on Amazon and video is largely hosted on S3. Yes, there’s a large CDN in the mix too. That doesn’t take away from the achievement.
Well, what do you think Netflix is doing to be AWS’s largest customer? Have you seen any of their presentations on YouTube from AWS reinvent? Where do you think they encode the videos? Handle sign ins, etc?
That’s just the CDN. Netflix is still by far AWS’s biggest customer and its compute is still on AWS. I don’t think most companies are going to be setting up colos at ISPs around the world.
