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Interestingly, I think some of the thought processes that you highlight feels (i.e building interfaces) almost feels like you're advocating for a cloud-agnostic approach, rather than cloud-native. That is, by trying heavily to mitigate the downsides to cloud and building in a way that means software can be potentially moved later. Whilst I do agree that this makes a lot of sense, and I do this myself where practical sometimes these optimisations fall into the trap of premature optimisation, where you find yourself building large, potentially complicated interfaces where there really need not be one.
There are also, in my opinion, different aspects of cloud programming that cannot be coded to an interface. For instance: mitigations for infrastructure nuances. i.e, I monitor lambda applications much differently to how I would monitor the exact same service running on different infrastructure. Due to underlying differences, the code itself is optimised differently for different platforms.
I think the downsides of cloud native are essentially one of cost. There is a cost associated with vendor lock-in, but there is also a cost in spending time making components cloud-agnostic. I guess it's just a case of which balance of risk / cost is appropriate for the scenario. But it's indeed hard to quantify.
And ... Just my two cents. A corollary of this PoV is that the role of Cloud-Native developer does not exist. We have just programmers using patterns and libraries. Ages-old good programming practices! Nothing new
Agree Lou, I sort of lean towards a defensive approach which seems to be positioning towards cloud-agnostic, but the main message is something like "get off the backpack you've been dragging all your programming life, forget about over-complicated frameworks and just go for pure programming, taking the control back". It's a song against Inversion of Control in the Cloud :)
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An interesting article Pablo!
Interestingly, I think some of the thought processes that you highlight feels (i.e building interfaces) almost feels like you're advocating for a cloud-agnostic approach, rather than cloud-native. That is, by trying heavily to mitigate the downsides to cloud and building in a way that means software can be potentially moved later. Whilst I do agree that this makes a lot of sense, and I do this myself where practical sometimes these optimisations fall into the trap of premature optimisation, where you find yourself building large, potentially complicated interfaces where there really need not be one.
There are also, in my opinion, different aspects of cloud programming that cannot be coded to an interface. For instance: mitigations for infrastructure nuances. i.e, I monitor lambda applications much differently to how I would monitor the exact same service running on different infrastructure. Due to underlying differences, the code itself is optimised differently for different platforms.
I think the downsides of cloud native are essentially one of cost. There is a cost associated with vendor lock-in, but there is also a cost in spending time making components cloud-agnostic. I guess it's just a case of which balance of risk / cost is appropriate for the scenario. But it's indeed hard to quantify.
And ... Just my two cents. A corollary of this PoV is that the role of Cloud-Native developer does not exist. We have just programmers using patterns and libraries. Ages-old good programming practices! Nothing new
Agree Lou, I sort of lean towards a defensive approach which seems to be positioning towards cloud-agnostic, but the main message is something like "get off the backpack you've been dragging all your programming life, forget about over-complicated frameworks and just go for pure programming, taking the control back". It's a song against Inversion of Control in the Cloud :)