Day Two Cloud 081: Abstractions Should Save Typing, Not Thinking

Today’s Day Two Cloud episode is part one of a two-part show on abstractions. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks riff on the idea that “Abstractions are there to save you typing, not to save you thinking.” The public cloud is a massive abstraction, and it’s often sold as a service that frees you up from having to think about stuff like power, cooling, running a data center or co-lo, and so on. But if you aren’t thinking about what you’re doing, design goes out the window. And then you run into issues with an Availability Zone and suddenly you’re faced with an outage. The upshot? Abstractions don’t eliminate issues, they just move them someplace else. And that has repercussions for design, development, infrastructure, and operations. We discuss: * The benefits and drawbacks of abstractions * Where abstractions exist in IT * The degree to which you need to understand the moving parts below the abstraction * Being pragmatic about abstractions * More Sponsor: Onix As an award-winning cloud solutions provider, Onix provides consulting services for cloud infrastructure, collaboration, devices, enterprise search and geospatial technology. For a limited time, Onix is offering your organization a FREE 6 Hour Cloud Data Strategy Workshop (normally valued at over $2,000). For more information on this special offer, visit onixnet.com/packetpushers. Tech Bytes: VMware vRealize True Visibility Suite Stay tuned for a sponsored Tech Bytes conversation where we discuss True Visibility Suite, an add-on to the VMware vRealize Operations systems management tooling that helps you understand transactions from the physical up through application layers. Our guest from sponsor VMware is Apolak Borthakur. Show Links: The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud – R&A Enterprise Architecture @Ned1313 – Ned Bellavance on Twitter @ecbanks – Ethan Banks on Twitter Ned In The Cloud – Ned’s Web site Episode Transcript: [00:00:00.970] – Ethan [Ad] Day Two Cloud sponsor Onix is a premier Google cloud partner and an AWS advanced consulting partner their also an 11 time Google Cloud Award winner and was recently recognized as tech times number one for best cloud consulting services in 2020. For a limited time, Onix is offering a free six hour cloud data strategy workshop. That’s kind of a big deal. That’s normally a 2000 dollar service. For more information and to find out more about the six hour Cloud Data Strategy Workshop, visit onixnet.com/packetpushers. [00:00:38.430] Welcome to Day Two Cloud. And today you’ve got Ned and Ethan in a two part show talking about abstractions are there to save us typing not to save us thinking we’re going to riff on that because I heard this in some other podcast I was listening to and it really caught my attention, this whole notion of abstractions. And when we’re done that conversation, we’re going to chat with some folks at VMware about VR ops and then the true visibility suite in ...