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by chii
2879 days ago
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> no longer has to think about anything but his application code. i mean, CGI has always existed. This serverless hype is basically rebrand of CGI with some fancy orchestration around autoscaling across boxes (which, tbh, isn't really that much work, and most people don't need the scale required to make this feasible anyway). |
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I suspect that it's this little parenthetical tidbit, and implicit disagreement with it (or differing definitions of "much") that drives the creation of this kind of abstraction.
In some situations, I consider the gap to be legitimate, where it may be easy (not that much work) for an expert but difficult for everyone else, and, more importantly, becoming expert is non-trivial, even with training/mentorship from one.
In other situations, I consider the gap to be merely one of perception/misestimation, either because it would actually be relatively easy for a non-expert who had actually tried, and/or the needed expertise is shallow enough that it can be quickly taught.
I believe autoscaling is (or at least originally was) of the former category and that the availability of tools and abstractions around it has allowed a broad number of non-experts to leverage the wisdom of a much narrower group of expert practitioners.
OTOH, I believe running hardware in a datacenter (as opposed to outsourcing it to a VPS or even cloud) is of the latter category. I routinely read comments like "have to hire 5 sysadmins" from non-experts when we experts know that estimate is around 20x too high for a scale of hundreds of servers. Even at higher scale, if hiring is necessary, the hardware-specific skills are easily taught, so junior staff is fine.