Ensure that the reasons given are at the right level of abstraction - high. bits vs atoms.

I don’t think that infrastructure is more intellectually difficult to software engineering, this isn’t a contest, but there’s something about the difficulty of infrastructure that repeatedly trip up software engineers who have never done it.

There are countless examples of software engineers underestimating the difficulties of managing infrastructure, and I saw another post on Hacker News asking, why is Kubernetes so complicated? Why isn’t there a container management solution that’s just simple.

There are countless, and someone with responded with the classic Sir, you have inveted Kubernetes

Example: CEO of Dagster thought he could just ignore infrastructure issues.

  1. It’s where cyberspace meets meatspace.
  2. Logistics
  3. Identity is hard.
  4. We’re limited by the API’s of tools we use. We can’t work around certain things.
  5. We optimize for Infra engineers optimize for correctness, performance, and unit economics.

Developers get to define thier abstractions, we have to accept ours.

I remember during a post-mortem, a developer asked why DNS was designed that way, implying couldn’t we fix it.

  1. Atoms are harder than bits.
  2. We deal with complexity differently.  A sit ware engineer may have a database with a million rows but thywbysuall don’t care what’s in each row.  We can never truly abstract caring about every row.