Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

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AWS is extremely expensive, and I think I have to agree with DHH's assessment that many developers are afraid of computers. AWS is taking advantage of that fear of actually just setting up linux and configuring a computer.

However to steelman AWS use. Many businesses are STILL running mainframes. Many run terrible setups like Access as a production database. In 2025 there are large companies with no CICD platforms or IAC, and some companies where even VC is still a new concept or a dark art. So not every company is in the position to actually hire competent system administrators and system engineers to set up some bare metal machines and configure Ceph, much less Hadoop or Kubernetes. So AWS lets these companies just buy this capabilities while forcing the software stack to modernize.

I worked at a company like this, I was an intern with wide eyes seeing the migration to git via bitbucket in the year ... 2018? What a sight to see.

That company had its own data center, tape archives, etc. It had been running largely the same way continuously since the 90s. When I left for a better job, the company had split into two camps. The old curmudgeonly on-prem activists and the over-optimistic cloud native AWS/GCP certified evangelist with no real experience in the cloud (because they worked at a company with no cloud presence). I'm humble enough to admit that I was part of the second camp and I didn't know shit, I was cargo culting.

This migration is still not complete as far as I'm aware. Hopefully the teams that resisted this long and never left for the cloud get to settle in for another decade of on-prem superiority lol.

I was a at a company that was doing their SVN/Jenkins migration to Git/Bitbucket/Bamboo around 2016/2018. But they were using source control and a build system already, so you have to hand it to them. But I have an associate that was at one of the large health insurance companies in 2024, complaining that he couldn't get them to use git and stop deploying via FTP to a server. There is danger with being too much on the cargo cult side, but also danger with being too resistant to change. I don't know how you can look at source control, a CICD pipeline, artifacts, IaC, and say "This looks like a bad idea".

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