Comment by mhitza
10 hours ago
You are pointing the fingers at the wrong people. Cloud providers pushed this idea onto executives via their marketing and conferencing channels.
Not disimilar to how AI naratives are pushed on executives these last two years.
But alongside the marketing blitz they also offer certifications for people who are supposed to execute these projects. Even the most foundational certification exam -- which simply tests your recall on what AWS service is for compute versus networking -- teaches and tests you about "Shared Responsibility Model" that draws the line at what the customer is still responsible for when they use cloud bases IaaS / PaaS / SaaS services.
If businesses are going to cloud but without engaging / listening to competent people who know these basics -- then the blame needs to be somewhat pointed back at those very business leaders I feel.
This is not obscure magical knowledge either that is tightly controlled. Any cloud vendor will freely teach you that. Or even a google search would.
Who is a CEO going to believe? Amazon, Microsoft and the entire IT infra division or that lone SRE who disagrees with them?
I mean, every time cloud comes up on HN we see legions of techies posting strowman arguments about why you should offload everything onto AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.
Aws cto is basically opening every presentation with a everything breaks all the time slide, idk where you get that idea they oversell the cloud resilience
3 replies →
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No. If you're the leader you should know what you're leading. It's literally the job.
But the problem is right there: "non-technical" leaders. Never work for one if you can avoid it.
You just have to take a look at the Rube Goldberg-esque abomination that is the AWS web interface for a few minutes to realize that it's not that simple. Granted, most executives won't do that...
Or encounter their CLI and it's lovecraftian combination of positional arguments, named arguments, piping, json documents, etc, distributed largely by random lot, as far as I can tell.