Comment by infogulch
3 years ago
I heard this described as the "200% problem": when you introduce a new layer to solve your annoyance with learning the layer below it, new users likely have to do 200% of the learning because now they have to learn your new layer and the layer below it because your layer is leaky. I first heard this from a great recent talk by the creator of Chef, Adam Jacob -- What if Infrastructure as Code never existed [1]. This applies to everything with a error / abstraction-leakage rate that is observable on human timescales, definitely including everything cloudy/devopsy/sysadminy. An example of an abstraction that lands on the other side of that definition are 'digital' computers, which are really analog underneath but they present an abstraction with an error rate like 1e-15 which is well below the threshold where we suspend disbelief.
Really the best you can hope for with a layer on top of system configuration is to just reduce boilerplate in the lower layer.
A colleague once coined the term "horizontal abstractions" (referring to a lot of the java "enterprise" pomp and ceremony) referring to much the same effect (there's no pyramid of abstractions - just more layers of similar complexity).
Unless.. you do a really good job, like heroku, vercel etc.
Also why is AWS so complicated? That’s where the money is: enterprises!
I believe businesses like Microsoft, AWS, etc. all make their enterprise stuff super complicated as an excuse to sell support contracts. I remember trying to set up Windows Deployment Server, and the whole thing was very unreasonably complicated. I got it working, but I can see why businesses would pay for support contracts just so they have someone to call to walk them through all the esoteric steps, menus, options spread across the whole OS. The other side of it is, if you make your cloud offering super complex then you're pretty much locked into that platform because of sunk cost. Switching from Azure to AWS or whatever would be a huge undertaking.
That's really what frustrates me the most about modern technology. It's like tech and software developers love to rube-goldberg things, and everything is vastly more complicated than it needs to be. The thing is, tech people seem to like complexity for the sake of complexity. It gives them a fun [read: masochistic] puzzle to work on and makes them feel smart.
Heroku is great until you need to do something non-standard in your deployment, like compile node and configure a python virtualenv in the same deploy. Then you have to learn their Buildpack framework and that is a nightmare. It's a hugely complicated abstraction layer that, like one of the parent comments says, requires me to learn 200%. I have to learn all the steps to install/configure nodejs, then python, then how they decided to slap together a layer on top of it that made assumptions like you would only be doing one of these things.
This is a spot on term for this, unfortunately way too common in the SaaS world.