Comment by likis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by likis | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see how your example of querying elasticsearch has anything to do with the above. I do agree that it requires the developer to at least understand the basic concepts of kubernetes, if you are running your application in kubernetes.

I rather like to think of it that certain things that was handled by other professionals are now managed or automated with cloud technology. Take Google PubSub for example, a message bus with pretty much zero operational overhead. You simply create your topic and subscriptions and it just works. Compare that to running and maintaining a system like Redis or Kafka on your on-premise hardware.

As a developer you still need to understand the interfaces of the products you are working with, regardless if it is a database, a messagebus, a REST api or kubernetes.

Ok here's the short version: as a programmer I'm also now responsible for maintaining and upgrading all that environment around my program. Which I wasn't before, a time when understanding its interfaces was enough. Can this be denied?

For managed products, upgrades are often automatic and there is almost no maintenance that needs to be done. At least that is my impression when running stuff in GCP. For example:

* CloudSQL Postgres, automatic minor/patch upgrades, they working on seamless major upgrades. Automatic disk increase. You would only need to make sure that you have enough resources in terms of CPU/Memory. * PubSub, no maintenance or updates required.

It is more work to keep java and the related dependencies up to date. We use renovatebot to help us automate things like that.

In my experience it is very easy to change and setup the managed products, I declare them in code using terraform and then I don't have to do much at all. This is what is so awesome with the cloud managed products.

If you are trying to be cloud agnostic, then you are just treating the cloud as another datacenter, and then you don't really get any of the benefits of using cloud specific managed products. Then you need a professional to keep maintaining your infrastructure.

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