devops from the days of cheap money

15 Years of near 0% interest rates has done weird stuff to our economy, and our sector.

I've been around long enough to hear tales of the first dot com boom, and the following bust - there was a total "land grab" / don't worry about profits mentality then - Amazon was one of the most notable examples of that. (I remember thinking it was weird when they first went to "dilute" their brand from being THE place for books online to other random products... which shows you why I'm a UI/UX Engineer and not a business guy.) So hearing how we had dot com boom (and bust) part two thanks to cheap money makes a sad kind of sense, and many of us our suffering from the industry hangover now.

This video focuses on the implication for DevOps, anything for scale and costs be damned. One former employer of mine really went nuts when they pivoted to AWS Cloud -  just set up services willy nilly for dev or qa or prod or just for the hell of it really, burnt through so much cash. Everyone got some stern "talking to"s and policy was locked down. My following employer was notably more cautious, and ran their own server farm in a datacenter. They were pretty stodgy about it (and were blurring some of the traditional boundaries by having dev engineers overseeing pushes) But maybe some of the benefit you have with that approach had to be weighed against being out of step with the industry, and so generally relying too much on homegrown approaches, and I believe they are doing PoCs for cloud stuff now.

And It's still a challenge for my side project work. For my critical sites, I still depend on old school monolithic deployments - and apply a lot of basic static rendering and pushing stuff to the client for the stuff the traffic that I know will be particularly spiky. In part to avoid cost pitfalls and setting up new business relationships, and also because it seems like you could burn a lot of cycles figuring out what to learn in Jr DevOps land...

(And just to add, I am still on the hunt for a Boston-area or remote UI/UX Engineering Role. I have deep and wide experience on household name websites and small fiesty startups, so if you think you might know a fit let me know!)