[101km]

"The result was a system composed of many wavefronts of change: some systems were automated with Puppet, some with Terraform, some used ECS and others used straight EC2.

In 2012 we were proud to have an architecture that could evolve so frequently, letting us experiment continually, discovering what worked and doing more of it.

In 2017, however, we finally recognised that things had changed.

AWS is significantly more complex today than when we started using it. It provides an incredible amount of choice and power but not without cost. Any team that interacts with EC2 today must now navigate decisions on VPCs , networking and many, many more."

Of course, this time, it is different.

[mmt]

I do certainly wonder if the ever-increasing levels of complexity in the layers of abstraction will backfire in some way soon.

It seems the trend has accelerated recently.

[bonesss]

Luckily there's an easy fix for that: adding more layers abstraction :D

[mmt]

I'll bet you have an "easy" fix for Social Security, too :)

Joking aside, I certainly understand the benefits of abstraction. As someone always points out in any discussion about ORMs, for example, abstractions are leaky. Whenever one has to learn about the inner workings of what the abstraction is hiding, some of that ease evaporates.

[erikb]

> [...] this time, it is different.

Literally a quote from my managers (not related to k8s or aws alone, though). They also made sure to repeat that phrase a few times so it becomes more believable.

[fulafel]

"What's different this time?" is a classic question to ask yourself when evaluating tech choices. Sometimes the answer is that something does make it different this time, it's not just a rhetorical device to dismiss things that have been tried before.

Most things don't take off the first time they're tried. Think of all the current mainstream or trendy stuff, like virtualization, massively parallel coprocessors (now called GPUs), AI, multicore processors, etc. They all tried to come to market decades ago and had just niche success.