[eternalban]

I've [had] this conversation with clients, CTO level, mostly in context of microservices. A few observations:

- Peter Principle: most decision makers are/feel technically insecure in the blog driven tech age, and cave in to direction from below. Of course, young developers want to play with shiny new things (given the general drudgery of the work involved).

- Emergence of DevOps: Engineers are being commoditized. There is an undeniable deskilling that goes hand in hand with having to wear all the technical hats. (A side glance here to pattern of deskilling of pilots in the age of fly by wire.) Sure, you will need to learn new 'tools' as 'operators', but what's the vote HN: what percent of these engineers could actually build one of these distributed systems? (To say nothing of being able to reign in the asynchronous distributed monster when it starts hitting its pain points.)

- You're not Google: I'm rather blunt when a team points to "Google does it". Google and the like have made a virtue out of necessity. Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc. had to resort to the pattern of lots of disposable commodity boxes. They also have the chops in house to field SREs that are simply not going to play machine room operator for enterprise IT.

The overwhelming majority of systems out there can run on a deployment scheme that 1:1 matches the logical diagram (x2 for fail over). And yes, it is amazing what one can do on a single laptop these days.