Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)

> I can set up a static website in AWS, but it takes 45 steps in the console and 12 of them are highly confusing if you never did it before

Anything can be confusing/takes time if you never did before. Getting productive needs time and practice. If your goal is only to set up a static site, AWS is an overkill for it.

> It's sad this is the current state of infrastructure.

It’s sad that some people still haven’t learned to pick the right tool for a problem.

> I could go on, but I won't. I'm dreaming of a world where things are truly serverless.

I don’t even understand what the author wants here. There is no such thing “truly serverless”. Your code will be executed by a server. Period. Serverless is just a fancy marketing term for ephemeral lightweight VMs.

> If I make a change in the AWS console, or if I add a new pod to Kubernetes, or whatever, I want that to happen in seconds

The author obviously doesn’t have any knowledge about distributed systems.

> My deep desire is to make it easy to create ephemeral resources. Do you need a database for your test suite? Create it in the cloud in a way so that it gets garbage collected once your test suite is done.

Fortunately we have Terraform that’s made this possible for a decade(?).

> Code not configuration

Terraform, Pulumi, countless of client libraries for all of the cloud providers.

This is nit-picky. "Serverless" refers to the "dev", not the "ops", and has done for a while.

Fortunately we have Terraform that’s made this possible for a decade(?).

Setting up production-grade DBs in Terraform is easy?

Oh, yes, it is. Setting up the resources actually the easiest part, most of the problems originate from the phenomenon that as the developers starts to use more and more "serverless" things, they know less about how the underlying technology works, how to use indexes, structure the database, how replication or transaction works. Production readiness is not just how a resource is configured. It is about how the application uses a resource efficiently.

> This is nit-picky. "Serverless" refers to the "dev", not the "ops", and has done for a while.

There is no "dev" and "ops" serverless. Your application will run on one or multiple CPUs, will use the memory, the disk, the network. When you write the application all of these matter, memory management, network communication, CPU caches, parallel execution, concurrency, disk access. It does not matter if you call it serverless, cloud, bare metal, etc. The basics are the same.

The author says what they want. It's literally their next sentence:

"As in, I don't want to think about future resource needs, I just want things to magically handle it."

and they have four bullet points with examples of what this means to them earlier.

I think it's fair to argue about the desirability, achievability, etc of this. I don't think it's fair to act as if the author is just spewing buzzwords without explanation.