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This is a great article that expresses a similar desire for a "real" programming language as an article I wrote here: https://adaptjs.org/blog/2019/09/25/react-for-infrastructure I think the real problem we have with infrastructure is one of evolution, abstractions and leaky abstractions. First, infrastructure is not a static thing, it changes over time in response to code updates, environmental load (autoscaling), etc. And the details here matter. How should new code be rolled out (blue/green, how fast, what are the quality metrics, etc.). What should happen to the old instances while the new stuff is rolling out? When should they be killed? What we really need is a good way to declaratively specify what to do, and how the components in that declarative specification should evolve as new stuff is rolled in, load changes, etc. We need a good way to specify the control plane for our infrastructure. adaptjs (adaptjs.org) is our TypeScript-based open source project to provide this. It is still early stage, but I think it is pretty promising. The second issue is one of abstraction. All these things are complex and often need customization to suit the particular application challenges. Using templates, CDK, Pulumi, or anything else to generate YAML is fine, but as the article points out, you have no insight into how your specification got realized into the low-level infrastructure. Moreover, you have to care since you need to know the low-level implementation to debug, understand cost, analyze logs, etc. Adapt has some machinery so that you don't always need to understand the low-level implementation for this stuff, but since it is still early, that part of the system needs work before it is ready for prime time. |