[torginus]

Not really a hardcore infra guy, but on the coding side, I know companies with products that have codebases in the multi million LoC range written over decades, one of my friends interned there and told me they didn't even let him work on the core product for months, they put him on some custom testing framework they had for it, just so he could get familiar enough with the core code to be able to contribute meaningfully.

He told me that before they started doing that, there were incidents like teams writing entire modules they didn't know already existed - now there were 2 pieces of code doing basically the same thing, that were just incompatible enough to not be possible to merge them.

[thelastgallon]

And how does AWS help with this?

[torginus]

On the infra side - by standardizing things.

One time, in on prem, we had a custom setup with a machine running half the services we used, including a reverse proxy using haproxy with some custom Lua scripts for routing, a fileserver using lighttpd, some docker compose stuff, a stateless query thingy running on nodejs, etc.

We needed to change something, and the guy who wrote it left a year ago and we had to reverse engineer the stuff he did (some of it was quite questionable).

We weren't entirely successful and had to rewrite some stuff. I'm not saying how it was done wasn't clever or cost efficient, but damn if it was done on AWS, I probably would've known where to look for stuff (and so would've most of my colleagues).