[derefr]

But modern approaches to dev require the SWEs to understand and model the operation of their software, and in fact program in terms of it — “writing infrastructure” rather than just code.

Lambda functions, for example: you have to understand their performance and scalability characteristics — in turn requiring knowledge of things like the latency added by crossing the boundary between a managed shared service cluster and a VPC — in order to understand how and where to factor things into individual deployable functions.

[zdragnar]

That is barely tip-toeing across the very edges of SRE land.

[derefr]

Alright, how about expecting devs to repackage their entire until-that-point-SaaS stack into an "appliance" (Kubernetes Helm chart), containing SWE-written resource manifests that define the application's scaling characteristics across arbitrarily-shaped k8s clusters they won't get to see in advance, using only node taints; memory limits for layers of their stack they've never even seen run full-bore before; health checks that multiplex back up to a central monitoring platform; safely-revertible multiphase upgrade rollout behavior that never decreases availability; and so forth;

...and then those same devs being expected to directly debug the behavior of this "appliance" in a client environment (think: someone consuming the "appliance" through the Amazon Marketplace, where this launches the workload into an EKS cluster in the customer's own VPC, with the customer in control of defining that cluster's node pools);

...where this can involve, for example, figuring out that a seemingly-innocent bounded-size Redis cache deployment, needs 10x its steady-state memory, when booting from a persisted AOF file... for some godforsaken reason.

[bravetraveler]

Yea, this is buying and using toys. Need to go down a few layers of abstraction