HACKER Q&A
📣 zwnow

What does it take to dodge the cloud?


I am not a infrastructure person and had a talk with some senior software developers about what it takes to be a senior in their view.

One of these opinions included how to work with "the cloud" quickly, reasoning it made the engineer capable of reading API docs.

I am extremely opposed to this idea, as much so that I thought I'll never strive for becoming a senior if that entails knowing how to use things like AWS. To keep it simple, I will never use a product that utilizes a "pay as you go" pricing model making my bills unpredictable.

I know that using things like AWS simplifies the deployment part a lot. But I also know that cloud performance is not as good as people think.

Point is, I am trying to grow as an engineer but not by throwing money at a bunch of companies and call it a day.

To dodge the cloud, I'd need physical infrastructure. How far can I get with this? Especially on the lower end of budgets? Ill never run a global scale application. I'd be surprised if any of my apps would ever have more than 10k users. This seems extremely doable with physical hardware.

  👤 ggeorgovassilis Accepted Answer ✓
The company I currently work for employs several mid-level software developers who've never worked with "the cloud". Their focus is software design, not operations (which is what the cloud is mostly about). The contact point with operations is container technologies. Their applications do REST, connect to databases etc. like they would do in a bare metal data centre. I occasionally need to remind them of low instance uptime guarantees, the need to plan for horizontal scaling, data replication and disaster recovery (I basically have to design the application architecture for them) but apart from that there's no friction in the day-to-day work.

A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.

👤 abdrehman
If you have bench marked your applications and setup the off site backup properly. I think its pretty much doable.

Can you please give some more context? Like whats the tech-stack of your Applications? Is it Monolith or Microservice? ETC...

👤 tobbob
It's true that (these days) typically, a senior dev will be handy with AWS. It's certainly not true that a senior dev is defined by being good with AWS. I bet Linus Torvalds isn't a big AWS guy.

I share your scepticism of the cloud, particularly AWS. They create this hugely complex system, charge the earth, and then rather than bend over backwards to help people learn, they have the audacity to charge more money for the training and certifications.

Rather than set up your own physical infra, I think it's reasonable to pay for a VPS. To me that's not 'the cloud'. Get a barebones linux environment, and you can do whatever you like.

My whole mantra is making fast and lightweight apps. Being able to create apps and services without needing the cloud, I think, is an equally valid characteristic that you might expect a senior dev to have.