[ragona]

I've started to believe that product engineers should manage their own infrastructure. I think the key ingredient is _isolation_, so that it's not that they have to figure out how to fit their service into the unholy single production account with 15,000 running instances, it's that they get to start fresh from a basic template and then move from there. Most services, when isolated from the other microservices, are just not _that_ complicatedl

For what it's worth this is how AWS operates, and I think it's the mindset with which they build products. You certainly _can_ go your own way and run something like k8s on top of it and build a mini-cloud in the cloud, but it's incredibly expensive.

It's a mistake I've made repeatedly -- "Oh, I'll just add this little abstraction to make it easier for developers!" But now the poor developer has to understand both the tools I built on top of _and_ whatever I was thinking at the time, and inevitably it's an under-resourced area.

Now, at a certain scale for core services, sure, you'll end up with infrastructure specialized folks. But I'm unconvinced that the place you want to start is, "Okay, I need a new service, better go talk to the beleaguered central team that never has quite enough time for anyone."

[pas]

It's a constant cost-benefit struggle. AWS can do it because they are printing money printers.

Sure, this does not excuse most traditional big corps that have huge internal engineering budget yet force a top-down rigid inefficient structure. (Though again, it takes a very principled way of doing things to be able to scale out and keep things sort of consistent and coordinated.)

[ragona]

I get it -- it's such a trap to say, "well, <tech giant> does it!" But in this particular case, I actually think they're walking the walk of having small teams that act like startups. You end up with small engineering teams owning a tiny little bubble, and it does a LOT to keep complexity down in terms of what one team has to manage.

(This is of course much more true for greenfield projects, early stage stuff. Of course the giant services are large and complicated.)