“The Journey Is The Reward”

Many years ago, when I was wood-working, one of my projects was an oak side-table. I spent months on it — hour after hour, night after night, bringing it to the correct finish. There was a kind of zen-like quality to the work, an introspective meditative state that I would be in, that would help ease away the daily burdens and leave me curiously refreshed.
Oh, I’m glad I built that table — I still have it — but the entirety of that experience was about building the table. The journey truly was the reward.

And then I think about AWS. The entirety of my DevOps-y life with AWS has consisted of mastering an increasing number of bells and whistles associated with VPCs, ELBs, ECR, ECS, and whatnot. And that’s before you even get to the Things That Are Not Three Letter Acronyms like Aurora, Fargate, Snowflake, Aurora, and such-like.
And, somewhere along the way, I realized that I had successfully confused the mastering of a complex process with the joy of delivering the result. The point is, it shouldn’t be this complicated!!!

Exhibit A here would be doing stuff on GCE. It’s really a lot, lot simpler for so much of what I do, and so so frequently it JustWorks™. Yes, yes, when you wander off the Golden Path things can get hairy, but at least they have a Golden Path!

Yes, yes, of course I know, that’s just the two prongs of the AWS business model meshing in harmony, by simultaneously locking you into their ecosystem by appealing to all that sunk cost (“We have so much expertise!”), and, at the same time, nickel/dime you to death by paying for all the stuff that you forget about (“an extra IP here, an ELB there, data transfer costs, oh, it all adds up!”)

Self-awareness is the first step to recovery. Once you see what’s going on, you can start making informed decisions about why you continue to do what you do. And maybe, just maybe, you might change something in the future!

Note: Azure is somewhere in between. I really, really like what they’re doing, but find that I dislike a lot of their defaults. I think that it’s because I disagree with what they feel the Golden Path should be, but I’m still on the fence — it might just be that their defaults suck .