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I hecking love the concept of shuttle. The only thing keeping me from using it is unfamiliarity with rust, but it's enough to make me rethink things.

I think the future isn't as much Lo-code as much as it will be (and goshdarn should be) Lo-DevOps.

There are so many advances in programming, like WASM for example, that will continue to cause this Lo-DevOps movement, but honestly, digging into the language, using the stuff that already is baked in for other existing business purposes.

But things like encore.dev and shuttle.rs (I'm associated with neither) are just mind-blowingly straightforward with no language, infrastructure, or other cognitively burdening information.

> I hecking love the concept of shuttle.

I'm not sure about it. If you're going to have Rust-specific deployment workflows, you should reuse the solutions that have been developed for the embedded ecosystem. There's no reason why "cargo flash" could not be extended to upload your binaries to the cloud, and support the same "probe run" workflow for remote logging and debugging.

The main disadvantage of having a custom language, for a user is, having to learn a bespoke language for a single tool. Very few are willing to do this. As a company, it is generally a distraction from delivering value. Engineers like it because it is interesting work to write a language.

Most should not use HCL as an argument for forcing bespoke languages on users. (1) HCL is not a programming language, more of a config language. (2) It was the right time and place, but has shown rough edges as it has aged, it feels more hacky now.

Just write libraries

The good arguments for "This should be a new language" are either:

1. You need to enforce a relatively unique set of invariants, which in turn come with new constructs to interact with them. For example, if you want a system for managing a distributed system, enforcing the lack of global state can be a lot more natural by using a language that cannot express it.

2. You want to provide some sort of novel language construct that cannot be expressed well in existing languages (function argument pattern matching, for example, cannot be retrofitted onto an existing language by a library, maybe by pre-proccessor or sufficiently advanced macro system).

1. Could a distributed language language really know what I'm using data for, i.e. if I put an object in an object store, is it global or not? Seems like a really complicated analysis. What if this happens across services? (Separate code bases)

Well there exists a language today meant for distributed systems (erlang, elixir).

It doesn’t support global state. Instead you’d write a “process” that’d respond to requests with the state at time of request. Another request could mutate the state, but each request is processed one at a time. So a “bucket” type data store (object store etc) would likely be implemented as “server” that returns the state. If the objects were large you could pass a URL/handle to the file which you’d retrieve later.

These processes/servers/whatever are running inside the language VM and are SUPER lightweight. Multiple language VMs can be tied together so the actual processes can be distributed across a fleet of physical hosts in a data center - this would be transparent to how you write the code.

If you wanted to implement that in native AWS primitives you’d probably run a lambda function to transform an http request into a S3 bucket address, then you’d go and make an s3 request to download/modify the file. Or the lambda would make some modifications to the file.

So, that’s the prior art on a hypothetical distributed language handling global state, which fwiw is basically how “cloud” systems work today.

I am aware of prior art in distributed systems. My point was that being able to enforce certain guarantees is likely impossible, i.e. your use case of global state prevention. Working with global state and making it easier is a different goal with different tradeoffs

Erlang and Elixir both do not have any way to express a global variable, or even a variable that can be accessed by two different processes (green threads, lighter than OS processes). All inter-process communication happens through messages. It's not checked by the language, there is simply no way to express the concept in the language itself.

(I am from the Wing team)

This is how we think about this too. Applications that use the cloud use a new kind of "computer" which have different characteristics than the model of a computer exposed by existing programming languages. There are some unique invariants and language constructs that cannot be implemented libraries.

The first of these unique primitives is what we call "inflight functions". You can think of `inflight` as "remote `async`". They are async functions that can be executed on a remote system (such as inside a container fleet or on a FaaS). Inflight functions can interact naturally with cloud resources around them (by simply calling `inflight` methods on the resources such as `bucket.put()`).

Interaction of inflight functions with the outside world poses a unique set of invariants. Currently inflight code can reference immutable serializable data and call `inflight` methods of resources defined outside that closure.

The compiler then analyses these interactions and inverts the control over to the resources to take care of the mechanics like wiring deployment information, synthesizing security policies and anything else that can be deduced from this high level intent.

Defining the cloud architecture of the app and being able to naturally crossing these distributed boundaries is the essence of what we call "cloud-oriented programming", and where we think a lot of the friction and pain of the cloud comes from today: every time I need to interact with "The Cloud", I leave the safety and comfort of my compiler, and I am out in the wild having to understand all the mechanics and layers involved.

Almost all existing languages/compilers take a fundamental assumption that the entire program runs inside a single machine. This is, in our view, the impedance mismatch of cloud development today. This is where we believe language innovation can dramatically reduce the cognitive load and barrier to entry for building and delivering cloud applications that fully take advantage of the cloud. Inflight functions and resources are only the first step. Think first-class support for things like defining and consuming API endpoints, writing distributed workflows, emitting metrics, raising alarms and other things you would expect from your friendly neighborhood cloud programming language.

I'm very excited about Shuttle, I've been watching it for a while and it looks fantastic. The only thing I'm looking for is support for GCP, but I don't see that happening until Google makes official Rust client packages.

> The only thing I'm looking for is support for GCP

Glad you like Shuttle! What do you mean exactly by support for GCP? Shuttle right now is built on AWS but that is mostly abstracted away from you. Do you want to use GCP products (say BigQuery) or do you want to host Shuttle on your own GCP project?

Really both. I'd prefer to be a bit more familiar with the underlying infrastructure and also I'd like to use GCP products, BigQuery is definitely a big one though!

I tried shuttle just because of this. Super easy!!! Like, too easy. Like, easy enough to justify making the leap to rust with this.

But Shuttle only deploy Rust code on your platform, it's a completely different use case. What if I want to deploy Python code on AWS?

Also, linking the infra code inside of your app code is a terrible idea imo.

> Also, linking the infra code inside of your app code is a terrible idea imo.

Why do you think it's a terrible idea?

Well, I'd be curious if that means it has more permissions that necessary to run in production because of that - e.g. to create an arbitrary bucket, or queue, or IAM policy.

Deployed services don't currently have permissions to provision or modify infrastructure. This is done by our build system while your services are being compiled. It is an orthogonal control plane with its own permission system.

Mostly because the two should be separated, you platform is closed, so now you have very specific code just for shuttle.rs inside "business logic", what if I want to run my code in a docker image somewhere else, now I have to strip the service from some integration with a provider.

Because lifecycle management, access controls, auditing, monitoring, delegation/federation, budgeting, capacity planning - all of these other things together, which these tools may or may not help you with - are still far less important than troubleshooting.

Seriously, when shit's on fire, the last thing you want is to be deciphering the magic that brought it to its current state. How many layers to dig thru are there, between "thingctl deploy" and a critical S3 bucket having somehow been deleted?

Not trying to shoot down the idea - I'm sure there are people 10x smarter than me working on this, who are more than able to make a lot of this work well in practice. But that's the problem with using stuff made by people 10x smarter than you - when everything goes wrong, it tends to require being 10x-smarter-than-average to fix it.

The true power and success of Terraform is in the blunt simplicity of its interface. Every time you run it, it will spell out in very large writing, what exactly is it going to do: add this, change that, DESTROY this - it even uses the word "destroy" to signify the danger. I really appreciate any tool that makes it harder to do the wrong thing.

> lifecycle management, access controls, auditing, monitoring, delegation/federation, budgeting, capacity planning

I don't think having your infra with your code precludes a lot of these things, depending on how it's done. They're good points, and as engineers we'll likely need to be able to do this for a while (until maybe an AI can).

> Seriously, when shit's on fire, the last thing you want is to be deciphering the magic that brought it to its current state. How many layers to dig thru are there, between "thingctl deploy" and a critical S3 bucket having somehow been deleted?

I see it as analogous to how higher-level languages abstracts machine code. When it was a newer technology, people absolutely needed to debug and analyze the "magic" but as the space has matured that's becoming less and less common.

> I see it as analogous to how higher-level languages abstracts machine code. When it was a newer technology, people absolutely needed to debug and analyze the "magic" but as the space has matured that's becoming less and less common.

The fundamental difference is that you can keep analyzing a program in isolation as much as you like. Infrastructure is a living organism - if you shoot it in the head, you can't copy-paste an old working version over it; you have an outage.

> until maybe an AI can

Why is the solution to every problem always more layers, and never less? We understand running production infrastructure far better than we understand AI.

It's not that I don't appreciate ML/AI - it's fairly impressive what it can do, given you keep nudging it in the right direction - but I would never delegate unsupervised authority to it.

> Because lifecycle management, access controls, auditing, monitoring, delegation/federation, budgeting, capacity planning - all of these other things together, which these tools may or may not help you with - are still far less important than troubleshooting.

I think you're right here and it's going to be something that's really hard to get right. I think prioritising the developer experience is the only way to get this right - even at the expense of other things you want to optimise for like costs.

> The true power and success of Terraform is in the blunt simplicity of its interface. Every time you run it, it will spell out in very large writing, what exactly is it going to do

I agree with this statement 100%. The explicit, simple and clear information on what exactly is being modified is one great piece of devex. This precise workflow is something that's inspired us and we want to bake into shuttle.

Neat, hadn't heard of Shuttle. Any plans to support Tonic out of the box? We're pretty locked-in to gRPC instead of HTTP unfortunately.