Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist

Why? I don't see much unreasonable here.

Make infrastructure changes faster? Why not.

Make it easier to create ephemeral resources? Why not.

Make scaling completely automatic? Would be nice. Though here I'd of course like to have some knobs to control the automatic scaling, else it could easily run out of reasonable budget.

My only disagreement is client library vs declarative configuration. I'd prefer the latter, but using some better language than YAML; maybe, say, Dhall.

And yes, it's now a common wisdom that the cloud is the new mainframe; e.g. [1]. Well, okay; if this is what is required to run services at scale without breaking the bank, so be it. If deploying to millions of ZX-81 Spectrums happened to give 3x reduction in opex, the industry would adapt to that, too.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26857859

> It’s silly to complain that AWS doesn’t have a service that allows any random programmer to deploy a globally scalable app with one click. For one thing, you aren’t AWS’s primary target audience.

I won't be surprised if AWS makes disproportionately more money off smaller operations which don't want to care about honing their infra, but want something be done quickly and with low effort. They quench the problem with money, while the absolute amounts are not very high. So targeting them even more, and eating a slice of Heroku's pie, looks pretty logical for AWS to do.

The desire to go "truly assembly-less" and pretend the machine code does not actually exist is absolutely delusional.

The refusal to acknowledge that software will never be anything beyond executable machine code on the computer is why most systems software is so slow and shitty.

I've been doing this since many years. Just not serverless. Rollout to production, incl. build took max. 20 minutes for a fat-client relational-database application.

The author is mixing here two things that don't depend on each other.

This is a lot harder than the author wants to realize. Elastic infrastructure deployment in sub second latency is not likely to ever happen. The problem is simply a lot harder than serving http requests. It's not receive some bytes of text, send back some bytes of text. VMs are just files and can be resized, but optimal resource allocation on multitenant systems is effectively solving the knapsack problem. It's NP hard, and at least some of the time, it involves actually powering devices on and off and moving physical equipment around. There is still metal and silicon back there. In order to just be able to grow on demand, the infrastructure provider needs to overprovision for worst case, as the year of Covid should have taught us the entire idea of just in time logistics for electronics is a house of cards. Ships still need to cross oceans.

My wife was the QA lead for a data center provisioner for a US government agency a few years back and the prime contractor refused to eat into their own capital and overprovision, instead waiting for a contract to be approved before they would purchase anything. They somehow made it basically work through what may as well have been magic, but damn the horror stories she could tell. This is where Amazon is eating everyone else's lunch by taking the risk and being right on every bet so far so if they build it, the customers will come.

But even so, after all of that to complain that deploying infrastructure changes takes more than a second, my god man! Do you have any idea how far we've come? Try setting up a basic homelab some time or go work in a legacy shop where every server is manually configured at enterprise scale, which is probably every company that wasn't founded in the past 20 years. Contrast that with the current tooling for automated machine image builds, automated replicated server deployment, automated network provisioning, infrastructure as code. Try doing any of this by hand to see how hard it really is.

Modern data centers and networking infrastructure may as well be a 9th wonder of the world. It is unbelievable to see how underappreciated they are sometimes. Also, hardware is not software. Software is governed solely by math. It doesn't exactly what it says it will do, every single time. Failures of software are entirely the fault of bad program logic. Hardware isn't like that at all. It is governed by physics and it is guaranteed to fail. Changes in temperature and air pressure can change results or cause a system to shut down completely. Hiding that from application developers is absolutely the goal, but you're never going to make a complex problem simple. It's always going to be complex.

Remember my wife? Let me tell you one of her better stories. I can't even name the responsible parties because of NDAs, but one day a while back an entire network segment just stopped working. Connectivity was lost for several applications considered "critical" the US defense industrial base, after they had done nothing but pre-provision reserved equipment for a program that hadn't even gone into ops yet and wasn't using the equipment. It turned there was some obscure bug in a particular model of switch that caused it to report a packet exchange as successful even though it wasn't so that failover never happened, even though alternative routes were up and available. Nobody on site could tell why this was happening because the cause ended up being locked away in chip level debug logs that only the vendor could access. The vendor claimed this could only happen one a million times, so they didn't consider it a bug. Guess how often one in a million times happens when you're routing a hundred million packets a second? Maybe your little startup isn't doing that, but the entire US military industrial complex or Amazon is absolutely doing that, and those are the problems they are concerned with addressing, not making the experience better for some one man shop paying a few bucks a month who think yaml dsls make software-defined infrastructure too complicated for his app that can plausibly run on a single laptop.