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Comment by mehh | Hacker News Reader

Thats code on top of frameworks, to do roughly similar things. As a software engineer I wouldn't be happy writing, and definitely maintaining so much code.

His points are fine, but shocker its the same principals that apply to all code, infra isn't that special, thought we established that years ago.

Also starting by boasting about the number of lines of code you have written to achieve something is asking for trouble.

It feels like many in the 'devops' community that are from an ops background are rediscovering software principals, this chap isn't alone in that!

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Infrastructure is special - if I make a change to my code, it usually won’t kill a whole database, load balancers, knock out connectivity, etc.

A load balancer is not much use if the application on the other side is borked because of the application code is faulty, I don't really see your point.

What I do see is 'devops' typically changing code in critical areas without taking sufficient care, but thats more a cultural thing than infra code being special.

Agreed and I'm from the "devops" side of the house.

I don't see a lot of build pipelines with automated tests and deployment for IaC. Standardized processes like pull requests with code review are also not ubiquitous.

With terraform one typically writes a template, does a plan, then apply and hopes for the best. What I've seen and the OP mentions the same in his talk is that things occasionally go terribly awry in ways that common software development practices would prevent.

If you make a minor mistake in application code, it usually doesn’t affect the whole site. Besides, when you are deploying code on a group of servers, hopefully you have sense enough to at least do a rolling deployment and are using automated health checks to make sure that your whole site isn’t down during a deployment.

Nor does my infra code, because I write tests, and have a pre-prod end to test it in a controlled ci approach.

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